Hi, Just joined. I’m looking for a database from which I can download a huge amount of data about songs in the period I like (60’s to 80’s) with the aim of making my ultimate playlist. Is this possible from this site? If possible, some suggestions on how to start - not very technical although I do understand relational databases. If not, can anyone suggest where it would be possible?
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MB, like any database, is only as good as the people inputting the data.
There is information available (which you already found because you already did some searches on the site), but being that not all contributors fill in every available slot, it is hard to say that you can build “the ultimate playlist” simply because it is quite possible that User A didn’t take the time to fill in 1969 for a release date when he added a Song B.
Is this songs you actually have. If so the best thing to do would be to use a MusicBrainz enabled tag editor to identify your songs, and store the MusicBrainz Recording Ids (song ids), Then you have a list of MusicBrainz Ids you can use as a key to get a subset of the data you are interested in.
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Hi, Thanks for the responses. It is not a list of songs I currently have. It will be a list of songs that I want to acquire. If there are some gaps in the data - no problem. I will attack it from a number of angles like artist / album and period. So, is there anyway I can get a filtered data dump from this database?
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You can download the whole database and run your own copy but that is probably overkill for what you want.
What you would normally want to do is write something in python (or a language of your choice) that uses the api to pull the data.
We do not provide a way to get a limited extract of the data.
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Thanks for your help.
https://bitbucket.org/lalinsky/mbslave/src/master/ is an easy way to get a complete data dump (as long as you have access to a linux machine). If you understand databases I would say it would be quicker and easier to create a list this way, if you dont understand databases then perhaps stick with using the WebService API
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