Is it possible to automaticly find artist, track, album and art from Bandcamp as a source in musicbrainz app?

MusicBrainz Picard
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Is it possible to automaticly find artist, track, album and art from Bandcamp as a source in musicbrainz app?

I have many downloaded audio files from bandcamp and some of them musicbrainz can find them and tag them fast but many are not found by musicbrainz.

I’m looking for a way to make musicbrainz use bandcamp site as a source to check the artist, track, album and art from.

I found this

But i think this is to add it to the musicbrain database?

What should i do?
I have about 150 albums from bandcamp that musicbrainz can’t find any id tag info about.

Thanks

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Picard’s raison d’etre is to tag files with metadata from MusicBrainz, based upon the objective of MusicBrainz to be the premier repository of music metadata in the known universe.

Since Picard supports plugins, then in theory at least it should be possible to write a plugin that gets metadata from Bandcamp, but IMO (without having taken any time to look at Bandcamp metadata APIs) this is highly likely to be messy. But more importantly it would go against the concept of MusicBrainz being a centralised repository of music metadata.

So, IMO, it would be far better to:

a. Encourage Bandcamp to implement a process to export metadata to MusicBrainz when bands post their content - however Metabrainz may already have tried and failed to achieve this;

b. Use scripts for independent automation of the scraping of metadata from Bandcamp and insertion into Musicbrainz - a Google search for “musicbrainz bandcamp” comes up with quite a lot of hits for this (e.g. Guides/Userscripts - MusicBrainz Wiki, GitHub - murdos/musicbrainz-userscripts: Collection of userscripts for MusicBrainz, by various authors, External Resources - MusicBrainz, https://yambs.erat.org/ …)

c. Manually create MusicBrainz edits for Bandcamp releases.

I haven’t checked whether this is already the case, but it would be useful if MusicBrainz supported storing of Bandcamp URLs for releases etc. as this would make it easy to check whether a release is already in Musicbrainz.

All that said, just because Picard is not finding the Bandcamp release in MusicBrainz does not mean that it doesn’t exist. Picard’s success in identifying a release from a set of untagged or partially tagged music files depends on: what metadata can be gleaned from the files, filenames and directory names to start a search, what you have set in Picard’s Options, what workflow you are using (e.g. Cluster+Lookup or Scan) and what metadata is in the MusicBrainz record (i.e. an AcousticId).

If you want some further help, then one or more examples of Bandcamp releases and the workflow you are using would be helpful.

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Yes, it does. Actually I’d highly recommend using the Import Bandcamp user script from @murdos ’ user scripts page (GitHub - murdos/musicbrainz-userscripts: Collection of userscripts for MusicBrainz, by various authors). It makes importing Bandcamp releases really simple, and it uses the existing URL to find an already linked release on MB.

grafik

Especially so for Bandcamp, as it does not have an API to query release info.

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Bandcamp does have an API, it’s just not public (anymore) :wink:

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In a perfect world and from MB’s perspective this would be great.
I just don’t believe that users looking for

I’m looking for a way to make musicbrainz use bandcamp site as a source to check the artist, track, album and art from

are willing to take the additional effort for the prior manual import of this data into MB, waiting for the voting process and then - maybe 7 days later - return to use this data.

Don’t get me wrong. This would be the best way for most of us. But please don’t forget that not all of the Picard- or App-users join this “This is the way” (© The Mandalorian) path.

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But it’s one way of achieving the goal. I think it is viable and useful to suggest this approach as a possible solution. If that’s something the user does not want to do, that’s fine as well. If you have other ideas, please add them.

But if we’d not offer any solution in the answer to the question the answer would simply be “no, it’s no possible to do this with Picard”. End. That would be a rather unhelpful answer I think.

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Just in case anyone else was thinking about it: I was hopeful that Bandcamp might include a frame containing the original Bandcamp album URL that Picard could use to look up the corresponding MB release, but as far as I can see, the tags in their MP3s just have a COMM frame referencing the artist page, e.g. Visit https://foo.bandcamp.com.

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That could be one interpretation. I agree.

On the other side, it’s just a fact that it is currently not possible. Not with Picard alone. Not with an App. Not without a prior manual effort which would have to be contributed by the OP itself.

To explain the situation is absolutely fine. But sometimes I believe that the helpful and friendly people here in this forum don’t get the point from new users and what they are looking for.

The question was “Is it possible…?”
And the pure answer is “No it is not possible - But if you want to read about …”.

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This plugin is to import bandcamp info into musicbrainz database? Then i would use musicbrainz as usual to scan the audio files?

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Yee, exactly. Right now it is not possible to get the data directly from Bandcamp into Picard. And as pointed out above it is currently highly unlikely that this will be done by a plugin, even 5hough it might be doable in some way.

The Bandcamp import user script is supposed to be installed in the browser with one of the user script plugins like ViolentMonkey. It is “just” an helper to get the data from MB into MusicBrainz, but it makes the process much simpler. It still requires some manual steps but all the data from Bandcamp, including album title and type, release date and tracklist, gets prefilled.

Once the release is in MB it can be loaded into Picard with the green tagger button or via file lookup.

Maybe that offers an at least somewhat workable solution for you. Maybe just give it a try for an album or two and see if that would help you tag your files.

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Not immediately and not without the help of others.
If you mean “Scan” as the button labelled in Picard, you need this 4 basic steps:

a) Someone has to add the metadata from Bandcamp to the Musicbrainz database (manually or with a script)
b) Some other people have to approve your edits/additions (or time will do it after a week)
c) To recognize your added and accepted data with “Scan” other people have to generate the AcoustID’s (=acoustic fingerprints) for this tracks and submit them to the AcoustID-Server
d) The AcoustID-Server connects the submitted acoustic fingerprints with the data you have entered in step #1 in MusicBrainz

If all this conditions are met, you can load your local tracks into Picard and press Scan.

As @outsidecontext already wrote:
The other way would be to use “Lookup”. This step would not need c) and d).
But Lookup depends on the quality of your existing metadata inside your local tracks.

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