I imported my last.fm listens here some time ago and connected stuff to Listenbrainz too, so it has been counting my listens for a while now. But I haven’t actually properly used this site before because of an issue I encountered.
Some artists show up twice in my stats. One of them has a hyperlink, while the other doesn’t. This messes up the entire statistics. I realized this when I first imported from last.fm, cause I knew who my most listened artist is, but that artist is split into two on Listenbrainz, so she actually shows up as my 2nd and 14th most listened instead of occupying just one spot, the 1st. And she’s not the only one.
Is there any way to fix this and combine them? ListenBrainz looks much better, but I’d also want to make use of the stats page, which currently has no purpose for me if a bunch of random artists are split up.
This happens because you have both linked and unlinked listens. When you view your recent listens you will notice some are linked and others not as well. Until they are linked the site doesn’t know which artist it is as ListenBrainz doesn’t work like last.fm and group by name. So it separates the unlinked listens into a different artist name in your stats.
The solution: Next to your unlinked listens you will see 3 dots, click those and then click “Link with MusicBrainz”.
You will get a link dialog, in the lower box type the name of the song and artist and pick the correct option, or go to https://musicbrainz.org/ and search or the correct recording, copy the URL, and paste it in the box. Once you have it selected click Add Mapping. You can also check the Missing data page which is periodically updated for a list of your most listened songs that need linking. After you do this it may take some time but the two entries should end up merging into the hyperlinked one.
Keep in mind you don’t have to fix every listen. If you fix something, all other listens with that same metadata will be fixed as well.
That makes sense but then I have a follow-up question.
Not all of them, but some of my unlinked songs on the Missing Data page are covers. I assume Musicbrainz’ database doesn’t have covers in it. So would I be unable to link those songs to the artist, since it’s not in the database? Because if that’s the case, a lot of my artists will still end up being split, even if I fix the non-cover ones that are unlinked. For example, the singer that should be my most listened one started off as doing Vocaloid covers. She does a lot of originals now, more so than covers, but sometimes she would still do covers. So if I listen to her new covers or old covers, I wouldn’t be able to link those to her? So anyone that does covers and to whose covers I’ve listened will be split no matter what?
I might be wrong in this assumption, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong and there’s a way to link them regardless.
covers are definitely allowed in MusicBrainz, and would be linked to the performing artist, not the artist who originally performed the song. as an example, all these covers of KING
Ooh, that’s awesome! I noticed that a lot of my unlinked songs happened to be covers, so I thought that they’re not on MusicBrainz and they didn’t have a page to get linked to.
I have 8 pages worth of songs to link, but I’ll just put on some music in the background while I work on linking them all.
This is kinda drifting away from the original topic, but could someone walk me through or direct me towards a resource about how one can add a song to an artist’s page? I don’t know how common this would be, but I already ran into a case of me needing to link a song that doesn’t exist on the artist’s page.
in theory the bare minimum is to create a standalone recording under that artist (either in the Editing drop-down or the Add Recording in the sidebar of the artist page). just be sure you add a link to the edit note or something
that said, the better way to do this is to import the release from whatever service you use. this is super easy if you use Spotify, Deezer, or Apple Music (or if the song has been released on one of these three) because you can simply use a-tisket
if not on the big three, there might be an import userscript for whatever streaming service you use (which does require installing a userscript manager)
last option, you can manually add a release (links in the same place as the recording links mentioned above). there’s a nice tutorial on the MetaBrainz YouTube channel (as well as other basic tutorials)
The song from the image above is on Spotify (dunno about Deezer and Apple Music), so that can be imported. I’ll give it a try now. Covers usually aren’t on Spotify though. That one is, but I have some others I need to link that are not. I see that there is a “Import videos from YouTube” script, so I’ll try that for those if I can figure out how it works exactly.
that script is fairly basic, and I’ve found it’s just about as easy to just add a standalone recording (the YouTube script doesn’t add releases). there’s currently a discussion about what videos should be added as releases, but in general, covers like this should be safe to add as releases, I think
