Hello Music Lovers, I’m new here.
I have been the creator and programming director of TM Century’s HitDisc E (Europe) Service for more than 12 years, supplying European Hit Music to TMC Dallas from my home, Munich, Germany. TM Century’s HitDiscs and GoldDisc where the music source for over 4000 radiostations worldwide from 1986-2003. As a true treasure, it reflects all the music major radio stations played back then, even American Top 40 used it. These compilations are regular CDs from plants like Sony or Discovery Disc, later (eg 2001) on CD-R.
I collected all the A and E (and some B) discs over the years (from 740-460) and now ripped all these discs as AIFF files to itunes to preserve original quality. Those 1400 CDs took me hundreds of hours to perfectly organize and name all tracks. I know, that there are many radio people out there, that would like to have those infos.
I used a Mac 10.11.6 with MusicBrainz Picard 2.1.3 to help me find a lot of tracks (some 60-70%) as almost none of these CDs infos are available at MBz or Gracenote, where itunes looks for it. Without Picard, I probably would have never done this anyway.
I’m very,very thankful for this help, and I would now like to share my work. BUT HOW?
I don’t want to rewrite those infos, as it is 25,000+ tracks. Is there a way to just grab a CDs folder or its tracklist with all the info to any Mac software and just upload it? I still have the original CDs here to create a ID/Time list.
What I’m thinking of is like:
Putting in a CD, a window opens, grab the folder from itunes (or the tracklist) to match, and load it up to MusicBrainz. It will be a lot work anyway for 1400 CDs
itunes does not let me load a list of tracks to a CD in the Mac to be matched. I did not find this feature on MusicBrainz either. Or am I stupid? Thank You very much in advance for your help and a step by step lesson.
Oh, please no discussions, why I use a Mac or itunes or whatever. It is what is.
You might also want to look at the “Add Cluster As Release” plugin for Picard, which may help with what you’re doing. It should be installed automatically, but you will need to enable it in the Plugins section of the option settings.
The genres on these CDs not like “Pop” or “Rock”, but are more radio format style like CHR, AC, AOR, Urban or even CHR/AC/Urban on some tracks. This shows the radio program director which tracks to use on his radio format. It is important to stay with these genres. Can I use them or are they just changed?
Just a personal opinion: It seems what you’re trying to achieve is not in accord with what MB is trying to achieve. The database lists all publicly available music while your music is not publicly available. It seems to be based on a professional subscription service and furthermore uses some special terminology which is not accounted for at MB (yet).
On the other hand, many of those CDs seem already to be present in Discogs. If there is general interest you could use an import script.
Adding these CDs to the database is perfectly fine, we have a handful of them already:
As @rdswift mentioned you can use MusicBrainz Picard with the “Add Cluster as Release” plugin to import releases into the database using the metadata you’ve tagged in your files. The Picard plugin will only import the titles, artists, and durations though; other tags, such as genres, would have to be added manually.
Welcome!! Sounds like an incredible resource that you’ve got ready to go!
I’m really just repeating what’s already been said, but +1 to:
To add a release quickly, drag the release folder into Picard, cluster, and then right click > plugins > add cluster as release. This will leave you with a few fields to fill out but the hard work will be done for you!
You can add whatever tags you find useful - MB will separate them out from its internal list of ‘genres’, but they are still just as useful for browsing/storing data.
One high obstacle is to find all the correct artists in a “Various Artists” release.
Just one example: If you use the above mentioned plugin you will be stopped on the tab “Tracklist”.
You click on the magnifying glass for an example track like “Tiger Feet” from “Mud”.
There are at least a dozen of “Mud” artists. Which one do you choose?
If you are lucky, you can find a recording called “Tiger Feet” from artist “Mud” in a manually opened new browser tab. It is up to you to decide if this is the correct artist.
This is one of the reasons why I nearly never add VA releases. If this process could be simplified it would really help. For example if the dropdown box with all the possible artists would already be filtered with only artists known for such a track name.
What ya really need is a bored geek who knows his scripts. I know on a Windoze PC it is possible to load up some of the Library files from iTunes into a text reader like Notepad and get ALL the Album Names, Track Names, etc. The whole itunes collection is stored in human readable XML.
What is needed is a plugin that can read that data. That skips the need of the “Add Release From Cluster” step above.
This is why you seem people mention the “import from Discogs” script as that is a script which scrapes a different website to partially fill the Release data for you.
But no matter how you go at this you will trip over @InvisibleMan78’s point. Not all band names are unique. Every method needs a bit of manual work.
This is a large project, and will take a long time. Take it slow at the start and learn from initial mistakes. Come back here and hassle people, ask questions, get us to check the work uploaded. After a while a better speedier method is found for streamlining your uploads.
Isn’t ‘add release from cluster’ just a few clicks?
There’s plugins and tools for players like Beets, Foobar, etc, but haven’t seen anything for iTunes. Assuming the albums are in folders you might be better off just finding a script that does it by folder? But I’m not sure of the benefit over ‘add release from cluster’.
Hmm, I would hope that with a ‘Hit Disc’ most artists would be present. Personally, I add a lot of artists to the database (with disambiguation every time to help the next VA editor…)
Nonetheless, this will probably take the most time. I’m not sure there is a way around it - just have to do the work and bask in the glow from the universe thanking you for making data available that may otherwise be lost forever
It was mainly as a thought with the collection in this example is so large and complete. An itunes XML reading script could pull out more CDs to feed to MB at a time, but in the end it wouldn’t really be much faster than “add release from cluster” as the time consuming part will always be at the MB end filling in the rest of the release details.
It would also only really be of use with a collection like this.
Thank You all for Your help! I’m still deciding what to do. I know, that these CDs are for professionals, not sold officially, but You find them on ebay or Gregslist anyway. DJs and radio professionals grave for these collections. And if they get a hand on one, they would be happy to have it perfectly organized when ripping it to their computers. Its not millions CDs like “Thriller”, but its at least 4000 pcs. of each of them.
Those few HitDiscs here already on MusicBrainz are badly organized and most tracks have wrong writings, just “various artist”, etc.
In my collections work, all artists are written the same style, as I finally reorganized itunes by artist and changed every different artist writting to just one collection wide same name. As it is still 7000+ artists, I don’t want to fill in nor select from a list of different artists writings on each again while uploading to MB.
There must be an easier way.
I’m gonna try the cluster thing tomorrow, and see how it works for me. I’m willing to spent up to 2 days to load up data, but to make a wish, loading a single XML file or something that itunes can create would be much better. I try and stay tuned here for more suggestions.
As you can imagine, there is unfortunately no way for MusicBrainz to automatically populate an artist, as multiple artists can have the same name.
It’s going to be much more work than a couple of days to upload everything - but after spending hundreds of hours on it I imagine it would be nice to know that you’re passing that hard work on to the world! I would start with a few releases, and then add more over time. Let us know how it goes tomorrow!
