Automating updates from other services

I would love to write a script that adds new releases on Spotify automatically to MusicBrainz every Friday. Is this something that would be frowned upon? I would be rate-limiting it and also making sure the releases doesn’t already exist.

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Yes, most certainly.

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Haha! Fair enough. Good thing I asked first. Is there a specific reason why? I was thinking people might be happy with new information being automatically entered in.

We’re very happy with new information being entered in, but fully automated imports have been tried in the past and always found lacking, generating more work for editors cleaning up/dealing with these automated imports than is deemed useful. We love the data, but our human editors are a much more valuable and scarce resource, so if we have to weight automatically importing a bunch of data against losing any editors since they can’t keep up with changes needed to be made after-the-fact, we’d rather not have the automated imports to begin with.

Also, if the imports can be automated, then anyone wanting the combination of the data sources would also be able to automated that combination, so the gain isn’t as large as may be perceived.

That said, I am currently working on a script to semi-automatically import Spotify data into MusicBrainz using MusicBrainz’s “seeding” mechanism. Human-assisted, semi-automatic importing are very welcome, as also evidenced by the large amount of importer userscripts the community is creating and making available.

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Thank you for this great explanation! I will look into the semi-automatic method more as I am very interested in helping out.

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Would be great to have you on board, thanks for asking for feedback!

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Proof is good, so here’s import exhibit A

As for importing in general, it’s best to consult more than one source, and consider “translating” (sometimes known as, “throwing away”) some data, like labels:
Digital Distribution Estonia
Digital Distribution Trinidad and Tobago

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Would it be possible to to use messybrainz as a staging system?
You could submit some details about the recording such as the track name, artist name track times, urls etc.
You could then login to musicbrainz and confirm that the details are are correct and either match these to existing recordings or add new recordings and possibly seed a new release.

Not sure if you ever did this or if you know about my project, but I made a spotify2musicbrainz Python script to help seed MusicBrainz release pages with data from a given Spotify album. Feel free to poke around with it and maybe even submit pull requests against it. :slight_smile: