Even after quite a long time, I am still having troubles understanding, and feeling comfortable using and mastering the search feature on MusicBrainz.
I can’t count the times I gotten frustrated with it, but of course just sharing my frustration won’t help me in learning, or perhaps exposing existing issues.
So allow me to give one specific example that posed a problem for me today:
I have a recording of which I know that Georg Solti is the conductor, and Christina Deutekom is a performer.
I would like to find the release(s) that have these two people in these roles.
My first impulse is to enter “solti deutekom” in the query field.
But, before performing a search you need to specify ‘type’.
There is not really an option that seems to fit the bill, so I try a couple.
Using ‘artist’ only results in showing a couple of artist names that match and won’t show releases. (makes sense)
Using ‘release’ results in 15 pages of releases where either of (part of these) these artist names occur.
So maybe I need to enter something like “+solti +deutekom”?
Nope. That gives zero results.
Now what? I’m stuck.
Here’s my question:
How do I find the release(s) where George Solti is the director and Christina Deutekom has a performing role?
You’re on the right track. A release/RG search is only going to work if both artists are listed as the release/RG artist, and it is as far as I know currently not possible to search for relationships (such as “conductor”). In this case you’ll find what you’re looking for if you do a “recording” search with this query: +solti +deutekom (no quotation marks) https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=%2Bsolti+%2Bdeutekom&type=recording&limit=25&method=indexed
Thanks @joiletjake
For this example, using ‘recording’ is indeed a way to get there.
Not important, but I am wondering why of the seven results, three have blank Name, Length and Artist?
Advanced queries pose a problem for me though.
Looking at the documentation on advanced queries, under ‘Release’, it says it should be possible to e.g. search for the number of tracks that a release contains.
Since I know the specific album contains 15 tracks, I try using the query: “Zauberflöte AND tracks:15” (without the quotes) using ‘Release’ as the search type, but it does not produce the Solti/Deutekom album, but only one entirely different album that contains 39 tracks.
There is actually only 3 results, not 7. There are 3 different recordings that are used on 7 different releases (some of the recordings are linked to more than one release).
“tracks” is the total amount of tracks over all mediums. The release that you linked to in your first post has 36 tracks (i.e this will find your release: tracks:36). You can also use “tracksmedium”, if you are looking for a release where one of the mediums have 15 tracks: tracksmedium:15
