Pulling complete place/area via API

Hi Folks,

First post here. I’m looking to obtain complete place / area paths for “recorded at” / “mixed at” via the API.

My command line app, by default, returns only the place/area available in the recording_level_rels when including place-rels and area-rels.

For example, for track 1 of this:

pink floyd animals

I get Britannia Row Studios > Islington.

It seems I have to walk up the tree of areas to get the full:

Britannia Row Studios > Islington > London > England > United Kingdom

That requires 3 extra queries (adding 3 seconds, to avoid the rate limit). This gets really expensive for compilation albums, or tracks that have a list of places/areas per track.

Short of a dump read, is there a more efficient way to request the entire place/area path to the root?

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Would be great if this feature would be implemented.
(I’m not sure if there is already a JIRA ticket for it, maybe something like SEARCH-359 but for the JSON/XLM-API?)

3 Likes

Thanks, the info was useful. I employed a workaround.

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Would you mind to tell us, what kind of workaround?

I’m using the web search, and maintain an on-disk cache of area MBIDs to area names, so that subsequent lookups are free.

Is it still not possible with the current API to get the complete place area?

Example song “Two Pairs of Hands” from Mark Knopfler:

I know that I can call the API this way:
https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/recording/74b12cec-322b-42ed-b669-d8d81bca05b7?inc=area-rels+place-rels
but I only get

What kind of inc(ludes) to I have to use to get the complete Line:
recorded at: British Grove Studios (owned and built by Mark Knopfler) in Chiswick, Hounslow, London (Greater London), England, United Kingdom

Is this currently the only way to get the complete place area information:

I thought there had been a change recently in the MB server API or am I wrong?