Release artist credits import from Discogs for an exisitng MBNZ release

[nadl40]

I’ve cleaned up Jazz part of my collection as it is easier than Classical. I’ve added missing releases and tagged it all. To my surprise, 110 albums out of 385 (about 30%), have zero performing artist credits, either at the recording or at release level. At the same time, some of the releases are very popular in the Jazz world, for example:

Miles at the Fillmore

Discog links points to a release group where individual releases have detail artists credits per track.

Miles* - At The Fillmore (Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series Vol. 3)

Is there a user script which can populate recording artists credits from Discogs to an existing MBNZ release ? I looked, and besides Discogs release import, have not seen one.

[st3v3p]

i have not come across any user script that will do that other than Discogs release import when you are making a new release in mb the tho someone may have a script that will do it and iv just not seen it. jesus2099 makes a lot of the scripts for mb you can always have a look and see if he has one https://github.com/jesus2099

[IvanDobsky]

@nadl40

To my surprise, 110 albums out of 385 (about 30%), have zero performing artist credits, either at the recording or at release level

Yeah, you have to rely on bored fans of the music to manually fill in all that data. If there is a script to import those details from Discogs I hope your question brings that out.

Otherwise it is just down to us fans to do the hard work and add the details in. I know there are at least a couple of editors working through the Jazz Greats adding details, but it takes a long time.

I did a bit of a blitz the other day on some Charlie Parker releases I own, but this kinda work takes many hours of checking. Having the Discogs Import Script in place does help speed up some of the work as it lights up links to the artists involved on the Discogs page, but it still means a ton of manual copy and pasting to update the relevant recordings.

[nadl40]

I just noticed that Group Members can be retrieved from Group Relationships (till now I concentrated on Classical…) so for the release like this, individual credits can be still retrieved

When Everyone Has Gone

becasue Esbjörn Svensson Trio was so stable. At the same time there are releases for the same group where individual recordings have artists credits

Viaticum

Is there a consensus what the proper edit style is ?

[IvanDobsky]

@nadl40

Is there a consensus what the proper edit style is ?

It is all about the album cover, or references elsewhere like on Wikipedia, fan sites, or Discogs.

You can add Recording level credits if you are sure that separate recording has those artists on it.

Some bands are easy as you only have artists who always play the same instruments and a single vocalist. When you get someone who swaps between guitar and mandolin, or more than one lead vocalist in a band, then you have problems. In those cases you need to find a reference somewhere as to who played on each track, or plain listen to the track to work it out. If you can’t be sure, then the credit has to stay at Release level.

Looking at the discogs link of the first one, the different keyboards in use make it tricky to nail down on a per recording level. And when was the whistle played?

Oh - and that membranophone on the second one can be changed back to drums (drum set) or drum machine if you know which they played.

[nadl40]

@IvanDobsky

Some bands are easy as you only have artists who always play the same instruments and a single vocalist. When you get someone who swaps between guitar and mandolin, or more than one lead vocalist in a band, then you have problems. In those cases you need to find a reference somewhere as to who played on each track, or plain listen to the track to work it out. If you can’t be sure, then the credit has to stay at Release level.

Plus the band members change often. Going forward I will add credits on recording level if known.
That Discogs user script would be very useful as Track credits is often a Discogs strength. I don’t have javascript chops to do that unfortunately…

[IvanDobsky]

@nadl40

That Discogs user script would be very useful as Track credits is often a Discogs strength

I find Discogs is like here at MB. It needs a bored fan to really sit and copy that whole booklet out. And usually they just put them underneath the track list, which would make a scraping script quite tricky.

[nadl40]

I have a Perl script that grabs all the release details I’m interested in, including credits per track, into a hash. I use this to tag from Discogs. No idea if this could help to create a MB user javascript, if anybody is interested, I can share.

[jesus2099]

You could make your script seed the release relationship editor.
It is not trivial to do but you already did the most difficult part (collecting relationships).

[yindesu]

@jesus2099

It is not trivial to do but you already did the most difficult part (collecting relationships).

AFAIK, there’s no documentation on seeding the relationship editor. Is it really easier than scraping Discogs?

[jesus2099]

Oh yes indeed. I thought there was a public doc about it, but seeding this complex page must be very challenging, indeed.