Guidance needed to open downloaded MB database files

MusicBrainz Development
1

I need assistance on how to open and manage database files once downloaded. So far I can unzip the files and I know the file extensions must be changed.

I need to know:

  1. What file extensions do you use? (.xml, csv)
  2. What software do you use to view and edit these files?

Thanks in advance.

2

The database downloads are there for creating your own mirror of the musicbrainz database.
They are designed to populate a postgres database and from there you can query the data.
There are a few options with this and the recommended approach would be to start with the vm.

The dump files contain tab separated files.

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3

Thank you. My website is PHP. I’m a novice at this sort of thing. I did read something about a mirror database.

So will I have to query the database from the PHP pages?

4

What are you trying to do?
Musicbrainz has a public api so I would suggest you look at that first.
There are some rate limits and you do need to include a unique user agent string so we know who to contact.
See https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Version_2

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5

My goal is to display artist name, release, album, cover art, tracklisting etc on my webpages.

I can populate my site using CSV files.If API would be more efficient then I’ll definitely take a look.

What are the rate limits?

6

1 request a second on average https://musicbrainz.org/doc/XML_Web_Service/Rate_Limiting

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7

Thank you for your help

8

An alternative that does to some degree allow you to just open a file are the JSON data dumps. They’e also huge though, so the API might be easier anyway, but it depends on your preferences :slight_smile:

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