Adding missing data to pre-releases after they're released

MusicBrainz
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I’ve noticed that releases sometimes get added before they’ve actually been released with incomplete or incorrect tracklists (e.g. missing durations or non-final track titles or orderings). This seems particularly common with Bandcamp releases, since album pages are often created in advance to accept pre-release orders.

I’m not sure what to do after the album is actually released. If the release hadn’t already been created, I could use a seeder to quickly enter the complete data into MB. Since there’s already a release, though, I usually manually correct the tracklist, which is annoying (and also bad, since I may make typos and I just enter durations with second precision rather than the millisecond precision that I’d get by using a Bandcamp seeder).

Is it considered okay in a case like this to create a new release and merge the old incomplete release into it? Development/Release Editor Seeding - MusicBrainz Wiki doesn’t mention editing existing releases instead of creating new ones, although I haven’t experimented yet to see if there’s some undocumented way to seed the https://musicbrainz.org/release/<mbid>/edit form with a new tracklist.

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The easiest way to do this should be with the track parser.

  • use your importer to ‘import’ the complete release (but don’t enter the edit)
  • go to the tracklist tab
  • click ‘track parser’
  • copy all the contents of the parser

Then

  • open the incomplete release
  • go to the tracklist tab
  • click track parser
  • paste in what you just copied
  • you might want to uncheck everything except for what you need, e.g. contains track times, but it shouldn’t matter
  • click ‘parse’
  • enter edit

This should fill in the missing data, and keep the same recordings etc :tada:

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3

Thanks. In the meantime, it looks like @Zas already fixed the release that I was planning to update by merging it into a properly-imported release (Edit #94942602 - MusicBrainz), so I guess that that’s a valid approach as well. :slight_smile:

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4

Well, since the target release was very incomplete, and recently added, I preferred this approach, as being faster and giving better data (including sub-second durations).

But I don’t usually do that, I try to complete existing releases as much as possible.
But I totally understand what you mean in your original post, I see a lot of “pre-releases” added to MB, with very incomplete data, and sometimes without any source, that require a lot of work to fix, when using an importer is much faster and gives much better results in the end.

To me, that’s a valid approach, but since it creates new MBIDs it should be use with care, and after pondering whichever would give best data.
And to be frank, the culprit here is more the one who added a very incomplete release than the one who try to fix it, whatever is the method.

But each case is different, I usually try to not create new MBIDs whenever it isn’t too cumbersome.

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