Announcing yambs (Yet Another MusicBrainz Seeder)

MusicBrainz
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I made a new tool for seeding MusicBrainz edits:

The main focus is creating standalone recordings or releases using data from text files (e.g. CSV or TSV), although it also has basic support for pulling release data from Bandcamp (edit: and Qobuz, and Tidal).

Screenshot of web interface
Screenshot of web interface994×1007 96.6 KB

I wrote it because I wanted to add a bunch of standalone recordings for a single artist, and I couldn’t find any way to do that without spending a lot of time switching between the keyboard and mouse to reenter the same data over and over in the Add Standalone Recording page. yambs is hopefully useful to people who (like me) can enter data faster in a text editor or spreadsheet than in a web form. :slight_smile:

To give an example, if you want to add a bunch of recordings, you can specify a list of field names (e.g. “name,length”) and then provide CSV input with one recording name and length per row:

First Song,3:14
Second Song,6:56.02
Third Song,0:56
Fourth Song,2:35
...

If there are fields that you want to set for all recordings, you can supply an additional list of field=value commands:

artist=7e84f845-ac16-41fe-9ff8-df12eb32af55
url0_url=https://www.example.org/
url0_type=255
edit_note=downloaded from https://www.example.org

yambs generates a webpage with links to the seeded edit pages and buttons for opening some or all of the pages in new tabs. (You may need to tell your browser to let the page open multiple popups the first time that you try this.)

The README.md file has more details, but hopefully the example values in the web version also give some hints about how everything works.

As part of this, I generated an enums.go file that lists link type IDs and various other hardcoded values (release group types, packaging, release statuses, etc.) that are used when seeding edits. I couldn’t find these values documented anywhere (and I suspect that my lists are still incomplete compared to what’s actually in the live database).

Please file issues if you have suggestions or encounter bugs, and don’t hesitate to let me know if you find stuff that doesn’t make sense.

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Perhaps against my better judgment, I’ve added support for seeding edits based on local MP3 files. This is only available in the command-line yambs program (i.e. not in the web interface).

I did this for one of my own use cases: I follow an artist who periodically releases new singles via their website, and it’s a pain to manually create a new release every time: I need to browse to the artist’s MB page and then copy the title and duration from the ID3 tag, copy the release date from the artist’s website, add the URL as a relationship, copy the annotation, disambiguation, and edit note from somewhere else, extract the cover art from the MP3 so I can upload that later, etc. Too much clicking.

Now, I have a script that runs the following command, which hardcodes various fields and automatically extracts everything else from the MP3:

yambs \
  -type release \
  -set artist0_mbid="..." \
  -set annotation="..." \
  -set disambiguation="..." \
  -set event0_country=XW \
  -set barcode=none \
  -set url0_url="..." \
  -set url0_type=75 \
  -set edit_note="..." \
  /path/to/single.mp3

(I guess that spending a lot of time writing code to automate a tedious task that takes a little time is the programmer way. :thinking:)

I created a v0.1.1 release incorporating the new functionality, along with some other small improvements.

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You mentioned in the Pulsewidth a-tisket thread that you’ve added TIDAL support, which I greatly appreciate. I only wish it pulled copyright details, label information and barcodes like a-tisket does; I had to fill in the gaps using TIDAL, and even that doesn’t differentiate between regular copyright and phonographic copyright much of the time.

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I’m happy to add more things if the API exposes them! Barcodes look easy to get, but I’m less sure about copyright and label info. I’ve filed https://github.com/derat/yambs/issues/23 to track this and have a few open questions there.

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