Part of the issue with providing the country information is that it requires a number of recursive calls to the MusicBrainz api to drill down the information. This can cause significant delays in loading an album from MusicBrainz, especially when there are a large number of album or track artists such as you might find on a [Various Artists] release.
I took this as a challenge, and have created a plugin for Picard that provides detailed artist information in a series of new variables. This is available from my github repo, and if anyone wants to try it out I would appreciate any feedback (especially if you find any bugs).
Additional Artists Details [Download]
Overview
This plugin provides specialized album and track variables with artist details such as type, gender, begin and end dates, location (begin, end and current) and country code (begin, end and current) for use in tagging and naming scripts.
NOTE: This plugin makes additional calls to the MusicBrainz website api for the information, which will slow down retrieving album information from MusicBrainz. This will be particularly noticable when there are many different album or track artists, such as on a [Various Artists] release.
What it Does
This plugin reads the album and track metadata provided to Picard, extracts the list of associated artists, retrieves the detailed information from the MusicBrainz website, and exposes the information in a number of additional variables for use in Picard scripts.
Variables Created
- _artist_{artist_id}_begin - The begin date (birth date) of the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_begin_country - The begin two-character country code of the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_begin_location - The begin location of the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_country - The two-character country code for the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_disambiguation - The disambiguation information for the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_end - The end date (death date) of the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_end_country - The end two-character country code of the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_end_location - The end location of the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_gender - The gender of the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_name - The name of the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_sort_name - The sort name of the artist
- _artist_{artist_id}_type - The type of artist (person, group, etc.)
A variable will only be created if the information is returned from MusicBrainz. For example, if a gender has not been specified in the MusicBrainz data then the %_artist_{artist_id}_gender% variable will not be created.
Example
If you load the release Wrecking Ball (release 8c759d7a-2ade-4201-abc2-a2a7c1a6ad6c) by Sarah Blackwood (artist af7e5ea9-bd58-4346-8f78-d672e9f297f7), Jenni Pleau (artist 07fa21a9-c253-4ed0-b711-d63f7965b723) & Emily Bones (artist 541d331c-f041-4895-b8f2-7db9e27dc5ab), the following variables will be created:
Sarah Blackwood (primary artist):
- _artist_af7e5ea9_bd58_4346_8f78_d672e9f297f7_begin = “1980-10-18”
- _artist_af7e5ea9_bd58_4346_8f78_d672e9f297f7_begin_country = “CA”
- _artist_af7e5ea9_bd58_4346_8f78_d672e9f297f7_begin_location = “Burlington, Ontario, Canada”
- _artist_af7e5ea9_bd58_4346_8f78_d672e9f297f7_country = “CA”
- _artist_af7e5ea9_bd58_4346_8f78_d672e9f297f7_disambiguation = “rockabilly, + “Somebody That I Used to Know””
- _artist_af7e5ea9_bd58_4346_8f78_d672e9f297f7_gender = “Female”
- _artist_af7e5ea9_bd58_4346_8f78_d672e9f297f7_location = “Canada”
- _artist_af7e5ea9_bd58_4346_8f78_d672e9f297f7_name = “Sarah Blackwood”
- _artist_af7e5ea9_bd58_4346_8f78_d672e9f297f7_sort_name = “Blackwood, Sarah”
- _artist_af7e5ea9_bd58_4346_8f78_d672e9f297f7_type = “Person”
Jenny Pleau (additional artist)
- _artist_07fa21a9_c253_4ed0_b711_d63f7965b723_country = “CA”
- _artist_07fa21a9_c253_4ed0_b711_d63f7965b723_gender = “Female”
- _artist_07fa21a9_c253_4ed0_b711_d63f7965b723_location = “Kitchener, Ontario, Canada”
- _artist_07fa21a9_c253_4ed0_b711_d63f7965b723_name = “Jenni Pleau”
- _artist_07fa21a9_c253_4ed0_b711_d63f7965b723_sort_name = “Pleau, Jenni”
- _artist_07fa21a9_c253_4ed0_b711_d63f7965b723_type = “Person”
Emily Bones (additional artist)
- _artist_541d331c_f041_4895_b8f2_7db9e27dc5ab_gender = “Female”
- _artist_541d331c_f041_4895_b8f2_7db9e27dc5ab_name = “Emily Bones”
- _artist_541d331c_f041_4895_b8f2_7db9e27dc5ab_sort_name = “Bones, Emily”
- _artist_541d331c_f041_4895_b8f2_7db9e27dc5ab_type = “Person”
Note that variables will only be created for information that exists for the artist’s record.
This could be used to set a %country% tag to the country code of the (primary) album artist with a tagging script like:
$set(_tmp,_artist_$getmulti(%musicbrainz_albumartistid%,0)_)
$set(country,$if2($get(%_tmp%country),$get(%_tmp%begin_country),$get(%_tmp%end_country),xx))