Is there a list of "Joining Phrases" I can download

I am developing (purely for myself) a program to organise my music the way I want it. Part of this involves extracting the unique artist name using the ArtistMBID and artist embedded in the MP3 file by Picard.
I can select the individual MBID easyly, but separating the artist into individuals is tricky as I do not know the full range of “Joining Phrase” Musicbrainz uses. Is there a list/table I can access ocaisionally that will provide this. I am a resonabley capable programmer with over 35 years of commercial experience on a variety of languages on Micro Mainframe systems but since retiring 10 years ago now concentrate on C++ projects

There is no such list, because “anything” can be a join phrase (even a simple space). It is not limited to some characters.
Whatever you can find on a cover or other sources can be used as join phrase.

You can find more details here:
https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Artist_Credits

2 Likes

Thanks for the quick response but surely as there is a ‘drop down’ box containing suggested phrases there has to be a stored list to populate the box. Otherwise how does MusicBrainz know how to construct the full artist credit for a track using just the MBID data?

Where exactly do you see a drop-down (choose from a list) box?

1 Like

Isn’t that what the ‘Join Phrase’ box is. When I have used it there have always been suggestions there, plus as I said, if there isn’t a list how does MusicBrainz know what phrase(s) to use when joining multiple MBID’s to construct an artist credit

MusicBrainz doesn’t know it. Users like you and me enter this join phrase as free text. We get this text from cover art or other online sources.
This text will be saved into the database as “Join Phrase”.

Later, software like Picard combine the First Artist and append the first join phrase, then the second artist with the second join phrase and so on.

But there is no conclusive list including all possible join phrases.

Theoretically, you could download the MB database and search for this join phrases for every single track existing in this database.

Just another example with multiple artists, with various join phrases:

3 Likes

Right, so the “Join Phrase” are stored in the database against the specific track on a specific release, so I could download a snapshot of the full (or partial?) database and extract those I am interested in.

3 Likes

Yes, you can:

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database

3 Likes