I am trying to fill in gaps in a classical music database that is missing the Album/CD title. I have the track title and track artists, Label and Catalog#. Can I use any of that information to retrieve the Album/CD title in the MusicBrainz database?
Thanks for helping 
-Richard
Sure, use the search ![]()
Im interested, what do you consider to be the ‘track artist’ for a classical release ?
For most Albums/CDs it will be the main artist (soloist) for the disc. In this database i am working with the Artists are listed for each track they perform on. If the Album is a collection of trumpet concertos by different composers the track artist is the trumpet player performing on that track…
-Richard
In case you haven’t seen it, since it’s not very prominent: the search page @outsidecontext linked has a section to search by catalog number. What that does is start an advanced search for releases by catalog number.
That search ignores spaces, so you can do, say, catno:CHAN0644 to find Chandos Chaconne’s CHAN 0644 release. You can also use the label in that search: label:“Chaconne”. For some reason, though, a search of label plus partial catno doesn’t seem to work: “label:“Chaconne” AND catno:0751” finds no results. Maybe @ijabz has some better ideas on how that one could be made to work.
I believe you can use wildcards; it might be necessary when you’re searching multiple things like that. So
label:Chaconne AND catno:CHAN0751*
Works properly for me at least.
Because Musicbrainz sets the composer for track artists for classical, I dont think that is what you want.
instead they are added to the recordingArtist
a clever workaround, but it really isn’t obvious And causes problems since we dont use TrackArtist/RecordingArtist in these different ways for non-classical releases.