Matching songs with genres & years

#1

Hi MusicBrainz Community

I have a large list of songs and artists (about 250K+ entries). And I’d like to populate this table with their corresponding genres and years.

Because everything is text, I can’t use CD-based meta data to pull the results.

And because most songs are re-released every few years, finding the “original” or “earliest” date is pretty difficult.

Sometimes I can find this info by hand – although lots of songs have zero genre tags.

I was wondering if there was an easier way to populate my list with the most accurate genre/year data?

Thanks in advance,

-George

#2

Genre is not inherently supported on MusicBrainz, though you might be able to get something from the tags. Year is easier, and earliest year is actually pretty simple here (look at the table of this recording, for instance), but you’ll run into issues where people have added the same recording as five separate entitles (when they should be merged) and where separate versions of a song – radio edits and re-recordings, obviously, but sometimes even mono vs stereo – are also separated (actually desired for the database, but potentially not for your list). Either way, your best hope for the year would probably be some script querying the web service using variables it pulls from each line of the file, but I wouldn’t know how to get that working.

By the way, Picard’s lookup works perfectly well without CDs, as long as you can give it music files (MP3, WAV, OGG, …). Still sounds like it won’t work in your situation, but thought I’d mention it just in case.

#3

If these are songs that you have, MusicBee and the Additional Tagging & Reporting Tools plugin might be of use to you. It can run very specific reports for you.

#4

I have a feeling that there might be “a better hope” in downloading the database and making some customised queries. Esp. since this seems to be data based («a list») rather than file based.

#5

Thanks for the feedback guys. I’ll share this with my dev. Maybe he’ll figure something out.