I’m in the process of adding the following release to MB: The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music and it clearly illustrates for me the straw that will break this camel’s back.
You’re clearly able to distinguish each of these names and break them down into discrete entities, as is shown in the screenshot. Why on earth are they not then split and validated against the database automatically. Why is it necessary for me to select each name on every row and assign it, when you’re perfectly capable of automatically matching them?
Even if you (mistakenly) insist that for data quality purposes users capturing releases should do the assignment because this will somehow magically give rise to better data, why does the option that reads “Change all artists on this release that match “Richard Wagner, Herbert von Karajan & Berliner Philharmoniker”“ not then at the very least find all instances of the individual names and assign them across all tracks rather than only those that happen to have “Change all artists on this release that match “Richard Wagner, Herbert von Karajan & Berliner Philharmoniker”“ in that sequence in the track listing.
Every single time I capture a Various Artists release or anything that involves more than one artist your UI needlessly creates work for me.
Why? Has anyone actually considered ease of use, simplicity and user experience here?
This will be the last release I add to MusicBrainz until such time as you stop treating contributing users like fools with nothing better to do than push their way through ill-conceived, terrible workflow.
My post wasn’t about this recording, but served as a good example of the nonsense we’re unnecessarily forced to deal with. Most names can be automatically matched. Namesakes could be left to the user or one chosen and disambiguation information presented.
It’s unnecessarily cumbersome to add releases to MusicBrainz and a lot can be done to make it easier rather than justify the status quo.
The main issue appears when there’s several artists with the same name, but we only have one in the database. Automatically matching that means the user is unlikely to double-check, and the stuff ends in the wrong place. And since there’s no way for us to know if there’s artists we don’t know, there’s no good way around it if we want to be careful. For what it’s worth, a fair amount of importers will pre-select the artist if they are confident (for example, if you are importing from Spotify and an artist in MusicBrainz has the same Spotify link).
But you did pick the most annoying kind of release to enter, so yeah, I entirely agree this kind of thing is a pain - it’s the worst kind of classical release which already is often the hardest kind of music to add
Which is a situation I’ve seen frequently, especially when dealing with various artists compilations. It often requires quite some research to figure out if an artist with same name is actually the wanted one. And in many cases it wasn’t and I had to add a new entry.
Matching to an existing artist automatically is at least a rather difficult task.
On the contrary, it’s because this judgement is a massive extrapolation of the whole system from releases that are by their nature hard to link artists easily, but it’s not that way for all types of releases.
Sure, there’s a ton of functions from search to relationship entry that user scripts really shouldn’t be needed for, but a statement like:
really only applies to Discogs by orders of magnitude more than it does here, with their only saving grace being that track artists aren’t required to be linked to track titles upon initial submission.
There is no subject to be discussed, as no improvements have been suggested. Nobody has ever claimed that contributing to MB is easy, or couldn’t be easier.
The how is the difficult part.
Mentioning that other sites have the same trouble is very relevant.
This is an open-source project. The OP may as well be yelled into a mirror as here.
Well, there’s a ticket form for improvement suggestion on MetaBrainz (which take time to act upon), so I think that should be taken into consideration when requests of this sort are made.
