Is there an easy way to split a release medium into two?

MusicBrainz
1

For example, this:

https://musicbrainz.org/release/ad83c6e3-ceb5-4d9d-801d-b8d0be7a0d49

This is a reissue of the first two LPs, and to my knowledge does not exist as a single medium release. I’d like to split it into two 12" Vinyls (as it exists in reality).

Is there an easy way to do it? Or is it just a matter of deleting tracks 13-23 from the existing medium, adding a new medium, and keying in all the tracks again?

Thanks!

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2

I have tested this successfully on your release:

  1. Edit the release Log in - MusicBrainz
  2. Go to Tracklist tab and press Add Medium then Existing medium sub tab in the popup
  3. Type 23 as track count, the title and artist are already ok, press Search
  4. Select the same release, it is not the first match for unknown reason. Click it and press Add Medium to get a duplicate medium on your release track list editor now
  5. Remove first medium’s last tracks and second medium’s first tracks

And voilà! :yum: Submit your edit with a nice note.

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3

Very nice! Thanks for the procedure; works great!

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4

@jesus2099 Works great. You can even split it multiple times.
Example: Edits for Die 30 besten Märchen der Brüder Grimm - MusicBrainz
It seems that removing the no more needed tracks from bottom-up is much faster then from top-down. No idea what could be the reason.

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5

I would guess that MB renumbers all the tracks below the one you deleted, which might take a couple of seconds.

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6

This method works fine with a tracklist of up to 60 tracks (roughly) Anything bigger, and the time to remove tracks ‘top down’ is a time consuming action. What would help is a simple check box and ‘remove all selected’.

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7

Because when you don’t remove the last track, the renumbering has to be done on each track following the removed track.
When you remove the first track, the most possible tracks are processed.
Maybe it could be optimised…

It could be because of the peek() function called many times in:

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8

Does anyone have tips on how to do this with a very large medium? As @michelv said, this method gets slow when a medium has many tracks.

Someone imported a Discogs release as a single 790 track medium. I am trying to clean this up but even splitting it into multiple media is challenging.

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For a case like this I wouldn’t duplicate and remove, I’d just create the new mediums one or two at a time and reuse the recordings by hand, which is probably going to be a pain but less of a pain than duplicating the medium to remove hundreds of recordings.

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I imagine reusing hundreds of recordings (original tab, copy recording link, new tab, edit recording, paste link) could be even more tedious than duplicate medium remove tracks (align mouse over remove button, click hundreds, multiple by amount of mediums)…

Ach, both methods sound like we should not try…

Or maybe let the release editor create new recordings, then mass merge recordings.
It’s a little bit of a pity for all those ephemerous MBID…

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Yeah, “import it properly, then mass merge recordings with a script and remove the old release” seems like an acceptable option to me in such a messy situation like this tbh, especially given the release as of now is completely wrong.

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I had a similar case with https://musicbrainz.org/release/9c140479-47a9-4612-96c1-3045aa2a0d73. I can’t remember exactly how I did it and I can’t test it right now, but adding the existing release as a medium and then trimming it down with the track parser might work.

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@Comrade_Mike, I may have misunderstood your suggestion - how does that differ from the methods mentioned above?

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It differs by editing the tracklist manually in the track parser text field, which is a lot quicker than clicking to delete tracks one by one. It’s a moot point though because I tested it and it doesn’t quite work as I’d hoped: trimming the tracklist in the track parser doesn’t affect the recordings used. Trimming a 10-track medium down to, say, 2 tracks will result in it using the original first 2 recordings, no matter which tracks you get rid of. So you’d still have to copy and paste the correct recordings. :frowning:

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