Is there a way to save adding/editing state?

Is there a way to save the current state of a realease or anything else that i’m adding/editing? For example, there’s a compilation album with 200+ songs, and try adding it for consecutive hours can be just not a viable thing to do, also something can go wrong (e.g. unintentionally refreshing the page, or going to the previous/next in the search history…). As far as I know, there isn’t something like a markup or text-based editing on MB, so I can’t save it in a plain text file.

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See this and related tickets: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-3929

You’re definitely not the only one with this challenge

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Hello @psychoadept. Thanks for your reply and link ^^. It’s good to know i’m not struggling alone because of that and that this is a possible feature and has an already opened improvement ticket, although it looks somewhat old (was created in 2011) and the last update is from almost an year ago. Might not be an easy task implementing it. Hopefully, someday it’ll because it surely would be a really helpful tool and would avoid some contributions being somewhat foolishly wasted. If I knew js and json id happily help. If I wasn’t importing the albums from Discogs, i would just try partially adding the release on MB.

If you’re importing from Discogs, you may want to try and use the Discogs importing userscript. See https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Guides/Userscripts for more details. That way you could import from Discogs, save the album as-imported, and then afterwards make subsequent edits to clean up any Discogs-isms and turn them into MusicBrainz-isms. :slight_smile:

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Hi there, @Freso. Many thanks for the tips :smile:. This murdos’ importing script is very handy. My challenge is that i had imported the compilation with the discogs_importer, but due to a lot of Discogs artists we/aren’t on MB database, i firstly had to properly add them. Along the process, I unintentionally pressed a wrong keybinding on my web browser that did lead me to the previous page i was on… and it was already the third time i did try adding it :sob:(human errors :sweat_smile:). Backing to the script, just to be sure, i could try importing it again but only adding 1/4 of the entire album, and then +1/4 til i finish it. But, as far as i know, i would have to merge all the portions later on. It’s not a straightforward workaround, but i think it could work.

If the release has separate media, you can add one or two media at a time. Even if it doesn’t, you can add, let’s say: 25 tracks, at a time. If you do it that way, it would best to add an annotation letting other editors know what you’re doing.

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Hello @Billy_Yank. I much appreciate your advice, thanks :smiley:. And well remembered, I didn’t think about adding different medias one at a time. I think the release has a DVD with 203 tracks, and four cd-r of 60 tracks. So, i could first add just the DVD and then the cds. For the DVD, i could add, like you’ve said, 25-50 tracks at a time, and save it. Later on, import again, copy the track parser from where i would have stopped, paste it into the partially added release and repeat til i finish. Then finally add the cds, if i find the tracks (because they aren’t on discogs).

I have, on numerous occasions, spent a “work day” (8 hours) doing a release.
It is one of the reasons why I haven’t completed more releases. But that’s alright to me because, when I have limited time, I have been filling in missing details to artist entries. It is quicker, and allows for more break time.

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Hi-ya @justcheckingitout. Dedicating yourself for many hours doing a release is quite impressive! I did like your editing approach. Filling missing details when with limited time seems to be a clever solution to add/complete big releases. I’m not a regular MB editor, but I often find myself adding most of the details when doing the release, and it sometimes leads to things like i related in this topic. So i think ill try to get inspired by your editing way. Thanks for sharing your experience :smiley:.

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Actually, I wasn’t referring to release data. I just meant adding things like birthdays, aliases, and links to artist entries.
There’s a lot of John Smith artists. So, it is always good to add information to separate one from the others.

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Oh, sorry, i think i didn’t structure my words in the best way. When i said “add/complete big releases”, i was referring to the post-process. For example, i have a 200+ tracks release of various underground artists. So, if I understood you correctly, i would first take care of just minimally adding the artists that aren’t in the MB database, and then properly add the release in itself. Posteriously, when i dont have much spare time to contribute, fill the missing details of these previously added artists and maybe some of the release too. I meant to say that i, generally, try to add all these missing/wrong artists details while adding any release. Many tabs opened, many keybindings i use on a Vim-inspired web browser, sometimes i press keys i didn’t mean to. Consequently, on many times something has gone wrong and my contributions were foolishly lost since MB doesn’t have a save adding release state/progress feature yet. So your editing approach seemed interesting to me because it could somewhat avoid or minimize the chances of that happening ^^.

When I first began adding compilations I tried to do everything in the same session, but after several times losing hours of work I now make sure all the artists are in place first. The benefit to this is I have become obsessive in ensuring the artists are as well researched and attributed as I can make them and do my best to fix any mistakes I find. Once the artists are in place everything else is pretty easy.

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