Elusive track metadata for recording

When I view the entry for a recording using a browser,

Unforgettable

I see items identifying the composer and lyricist of the music on each track. How do I get to this information using musicbrainzngs?

Have a look at
“Use release relationships” and “Use track relationships” in Picard->Options->Options->Metadata.

Have you got these enabled/checked?

I’ll grab this opportunity to maybe slightly flatten the learning curve that Picard and Musicbrainz presents.
Maybe you won’t find Picard and Musicbrainz as difficult as I did.

An album or a single is called a Release.
A Release has Tracks. (A Release can have a Release Artist.)
Those tracks have a Recording on them. (A Recording can have a Recording Artist (aka “performer”.)
Other Releases can have the same Recording.
A Work is a musical piece that has been named and can be performed again. (A Work can have a composer/lyricist/writer etc.)

AIUI there is more detail around Works available through the
Classical Extras plug-in by MetaTunes but maybe you don’t need the extra level of detail.

I am not using Picard. I wrote a Python script using musicbrainzngs. I tried enabling includes one by one. Several are invalid despite the documentation. None produced the metadata I see using the web interface. Track relationship sounds like the right thing. I assume that all of the options that end in “rels” refer to relationships. recording-level-rels, work-level-rels produce a Bad Request error. I have artist-rels, recordings, and artists listed in includes. There is no track-rels. I suspect that I am supposed to get a mbid for the track and then use it to look up the track metadata, but I don’t see a function for doing so.

I agree wholeheartedly about the learning curve problem.

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Unforgettable includes composer and lyricist

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Is there a document somewhere that lists what fields each of the includes provides? I was working my way through the various artist includes but hadn’t yet gotten to artist-rels.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Version_2

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Thanks, @dns_server, but that’s the one I was already using. It is pretty good at identifying what the options are, but not all that good on the details of what each option provides. For example, in this case how would I know to use the artist-rels option only after recording-level-rels, work-rels and work-level-rels to get the composer and lyricist information? Having gone through it a few times, I think I’m starting to understand, but for me it was anything but intuitive. I’ll do some more experimenting and perhaps try to throw together some notes to help clarify (a sort of "WS2 for Dummies" guide :slight_smile:).

Thank you, reosarevok. My first problem was that I was doing a search by discid, for which work-level-rels is not an option. I understand now that I need to use the discid search to identify the release and then use its id for a separate search by id.

I hope that rdswift writes WS2 for Dummies as I am certainly in that cohort.

I have found this page helpful
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Version_2/Search