Because I hope you don’t think I intend to manually input everything onto this website.
You could be more polite and install MusicBrainz Picard Tagger, then enable its Add cluster as release plug-in.
Then drop your album files in left side, click Cluster button.
Then right-click your cluster (album) and click the plug-in and review your release in your web browser before submission.
But first of all make sure it’s an existing release and not some homemade MP3 compilation.
Find sources/references and cite them in the edit note.
Add Cluster As Release is great as it also fills in album titles and track times.
Also check out the < Track Parser > button on the Track editing page. You can kick text around in notepad before uploading in a block.
Hello DerekFerric.
Although the graphic design on MusicBrainz looks so big-business and expensive, way over 99.9% of people here are volunteers. There is a skeleton paid crew who manage to keep the basics going. And the rest of us are volunteers. Just like you.
When you write “… I hope you don’t expect …” it reads to your fellow volunteers that you don’t appreciate the efforts of those volunteers who work out how to get data entered and do the coding to have it happen.
Anyway, thanks for going to the trouble of finding out how to enter the data you’ve got into the MusicBrainz db.
You’ve already found the right place to ask questions and get support from your fellow volunteers and the very occasional admin/paid employee.
signed
mmirG
(one of your fellow volunteers who, at times, have felt frustrated when trying to enter data )
Thank you Jesus! LOL, sorry for my manners, I’m not meaning to be blasphemous, I truly appreciate all the tedious work so many have put in to this database and have a lot to contribute but it seemed to require manual inputting of stuff I’ve literally spent 20 years doing already so am grateful for an efficient way of making this work available to all.
I’m sorry about that, I was finding it frustrating and far too time consuming to add a single release and doing the maths, if it takes my nearly half an hour to add a single continuous live mix, source a tracklist, reformat the tracklist in a TXT editor, then click to save the work and it returns a message saying it’s not good enough then I have to give up on adding every field and instead only input the compatible tags and somebody else perhaps can add tracklists, especially if tracklists didn’t come with the original retail version and for me personally I can live without that much detail. I have thousands upon thousands of live shows to get up on here so if it takes 30 minutes each I might need an extra century!
It will get much faster and less painful after you’ve added a few
I would focus on getting the release you added right, add all the time-consuming details, and then you can make an educated decision as to what you want to leave out going forwards.
Also, I have to say that adding details to MB is a time-consuming hobby. But it is so rewarding! I used to spend countless hours organising and tagging my large music collection. Now that I’ve been editing data on Musicbrainz instead I see that as pretty much wasted time. My hard drive will eventually turn to dust and (apart from the occasional bit of file sharing/Plex sharing) I’m the only one enjoying the results of my work. In comparison, I am proud of the time and contributions I’ve made to MB, for everyone! You are doing gods work when you contribute here (aka Jesus2099’s work ). So I hope you stick it out through the early learning curve and also find the joy in it.
Once you get into “add tracklist as a release” you’ll cut out a lot of your pre-formatting steps. Also as these are files uploaded for the public to grab you can get away with leaving the track names as those public MP3 files are now. MB only want to count the digital files in that track list, so many of your releases will only be one or two MP3 files.
Getting releases in place allow other people to expand and type up track lists if they want to.
Another little extra that may be of use to you. There are “Series” you can set. As many of these Releases you are adding are in those same archives you could link them as a series. That would let you leave more generic notes about the series in that one place.
As @aerozol says, this all gets so much faster once you are in the swing of it.
I always did this work with the intention of helping the community but didn’t know the best way of getting fixed metadata out there so sometimes if I gave my finished MP3s to a mate who had auto-replace all ID3 tags with data from WindowsMediaPlayer’s database instead of only add missing tags so it would undo all the care I’d put in adding guest MCs and venue details and replace it with whatever rubbish the first uploader had on there’s like Tape 1 Side A bollocks in the artist section. Respect to tape ripping teams but they don’t always tag their stuff before uploading it all which I avoid doing with my own rips at all costs. What takes me five minutes saves every single downloader having to do it too and means it displays properly for everybody. I don’t understand why people won’t take this time first, especially if they are promoting their own interests.
FWIW, you can just copy the info on a cluster by right-click, “info”, and then select the tracklist and copy.
Then paste into the track parser on the website. MusicBrainz can handle those tracklists just fine. (Though you do still have to select the artist entity for each track manually, it does fill in the name Picard picked up from the files.)
This has the plus that you don’t need a plugin. I know it’s included, but this is the way I do it because I have multiple launchers for different Firefox profiles and Picard always launches the wrong one.
What would be great is if the database could ask for disambiguation as a step afterwards so it only asks for single instances of repeating artists rather than having to repeat the process for every appearance of that artist in the release, so you can do it in bulk but I’m not a dev so I’m not sure how easy that would be to implement
Why doesn’t it take the Album Art from my files?