Howdy, I’m new to MusicBrainz and listen to my albums through Kodi, using Picard to fetch the info and such for me. I have a lot of albums from smaller or newer artists who don’t have pages on here yet. I would like to add these artists to the database, which I know how to do, but I also want to give the artists a description/bio of sorts. I understand that many artists use the intro paragraph from their Wikipedia article as such a description, but I was curious if there was a way to add descriptions to artists without Wikipedia pages.
Thanks,
Gage
PS: Am also open to any tips and tricks for uploading/adding albums and artists to the database.
Unless you’re dealing with artists who have little to no online presence, userscripts are your best friend for adding albums. The ones I use most often are discogs, iTunes, and bandcamp. Enhanced Cover Art Upload can automate artwork retrieval, too.
(Regarding your main question, the only answer I know is to add an annotation so I’m hoping someone else has more specific advice.)
Questions: There appears actually to be two questions here:
Can we add Artist descriptions to Musicbrainz?
Can we add Artist descriptions as tags using Picard?
Answers:
Musicbrainz has an annotation field, however Wikipedia is the preferred way of showing an Artist description on the web site, and duplicating Wikipedia information into an annotation is discouraged. Where there is no Wikipedia page, then by all means add a short description into the annotation field.
Here is an example of an artist with both Annotation and Wikipedia information:
According to the Picard documentation the Release annotation is available as %_releaseannotation%, but the artist annotation is not.
However, it is completely possible to write a Plugin to get either the Wikipedia description and / or the Annotation and write it to a tag (or indeed write it to a file in the directory containing the release). Depending on the music file format, free text tags may or may not be written out to the file and preserved (e.g. mp3: yes, others: maybe).
When you click on the EDIT tab of the Artist page you will find you can add URLs of all sorts. So link to a band home page or a fan site are allowed.
When it comes to Wikipedia, people don’t “copy a paragraph” at MB. There is a fancy lookup system when you paste in a Wikipedia link. The images above of The Beatles show the Wikipedia lookup in action.
Better than paste in a Wikipedia link is to use a Wikidata link. This has the advantage of being multi-lingual. You’ll find a Wikidata link in the top right hand corner of Wikipedia on the “Tools” menu. These are preferred and you’ll find other editors will delete a Wikipedia link and replace it with Wikidata.
“Release Groups” work the same as artists in this way. If band is famous enough to get Wikipedia page on the albums, then add the Wikidata links for them. If not, feel free to write your own notes. Ideally with references. And respect copyright - so don’t just copy blocks of text from other websites.
With KODI I think you’ll find that will lookup artist info on a different site. It is configurable in the settings. Think the default is AudioDB. (I’ll check this later… Am also a KODI user) KODI can be overridden with a local .nfo file for the really obscure stuff.
As to tips? Pick some of your favourite obscure artists and just dive in and try it. Post links in the forum and someone will step in and help tweak things. I find working on obscure stuff first means you tread on less toes that way.
That will add a little box to the Edit Artist page that lets you paste in a Wikipedia\Wikidata link and it then scrapes that link for much more info. Now some of the Wikidata supplied links need checking as I have found errors there, but it is a big time saver with filling in a new artist.
Be warned that Wikipedia is a little “Odd” about what they think is allowed. Or is “notable”. I’ve seen some quite major music deleted from there just because of the tastes of the editor.
