Best Method for adding English Translations of foreign albums

MusicBrainz Picard
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I was blown away with how powerful MusicBrainz Picard is and decided I wanted to join the community and use it to clean up my library. I have a gigantic collection of music from the Final Fantasy series and my problem I’ve been running into recently is that with a lot of releases being Japanese only, combined with many of them being compilations of other releases in the same library, when it comes across a rare Japan only release, MusicBrainz can’t find the Japanese album with the “Look Up” function because I have it in English, and when I use the “Scan” function it pulls up all of the other albums that the tracks on the compilation album are sourced from.

I got a little frustrated, but found the plugin that adds a cluster as a new release and figured I’d start contributing by creating English translations of the Japanese releases and I seem to have done that incorrectly as @CyberSkull pointed out in several edits. If I would like to add English translated metadata for people to use on Japanese albums, how do I best do that, and more importantly, how do I search for and find the Japanese album when I don’t have the Hiragana/Katakana/Kanji form of the release titles?

Lastly, if I wanted to create an album in Picard that doesn’t have any information on MusicBrainz, 1) Is that possible, and 2) How do you do it, or 3) Do I just edit the metadata in the cluster column and leave it?

Thanks, I really love this program!

-James

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[quote=“Rinke25, post:1, topic:91544”]
If I would like to add English translated metadata for people to use on Japanese albums, how do I best do that
[/quote]I’m sure @cyberskull would actually be the best person to help with that!

But here are the basic rules for pseudo-releases/transliterations (what you’re wanting to add):
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases/Pseudo-Releases
The guidelines are very basic, mainly specifying information that you shouldn’t put in, making life easier :wink:
Transliterations are definitely very helpful, especially in your case where it means Picard will find the right release group, and then you can choose your language!

Yes.
We always prefer it if you can add things to the database for others to use where possible, but if that’s not an option for whatever reason, you can just use Picard to manually edit tags (although most would recommend something like mp3tag instead which is a tool that’s more specific to that task).

Hope that helps!

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Thanks for the tips! I’m assuming mp3tag accepts .FLAC?

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Mp3tag supports the following formats:

Advanced Audio Coding (aac)
Apple Lossless Audio Codec (alac)
Audio Interchange File Format (aif / aifc / aiff)
Direct Stream Digital Audio (dsf)
Free Lossless Audio Codec (flac)
Monkey's Audio (ape)
Mpeg Layer 3 (mp3)
MPEG-4 (mp4 / m4a / m4b / iTunes kompatibel)
Musepack (mpc)
Ogg Vorbis (ogg)
IETF Opus (opus)
OptimFROG (ofr / ofs)
Speex (spx)
Tom's Audio Kompressor (tak)
True Audio (tta)
Windows Media Audio (wma)
WavPack (wv)
WAV (wav)
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I totally cheat in this matter by finding well curated databases and copying and pasting from them. :wink:

  • http://www.vgmdb.net/ - J-Pop, soundtracks, dōjin, some vocaloid, misc. Usually has scans of all (or most) of the packaging for reference.
  • http://vocadb.net/ - Vocaloid, probably the most extensive DB on the subject.
  • http://utaitedb.net - Utaite, sibling project to VocaDB, also very extensive.

On a side note, the last two listed have a ticket under STYLE-417.

3 Likes
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There are many ways:

  • You can search the catalogue number.
  • You can go to composer or label page and browse the releases.
  • You can search by your CD TOC (insert CD and let Picard or isrcsubmit or foo_musicvrainz search CD).
  • etc.
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