Tracklist import format

MusicBrainz
1

Thanks for reading.
What’s is the format of importing a tracklist?
I exported the tracklist with EAC in two formats: txt and db and wanted to import in a release.
Tracknumber and tracktime/lenght are imported but fields of artist(s) and tracktitel are always combined.
What would be the apropriate separator? Release is in the Freedb but for some unknown reason MB will not import.
THX

2

This works for me: « %tracknumber%. %title% - %artist% (%length%) »
Where %length% must be like MM:SS, even if your track is zero minutes and only seconds, you have to set it, like 0:34 for 34 seconds.

1 Like
3

Note also that there are some checkboxes under the track parser, letting you choose what elements it should expect.

1 Like
4

Thanks guys. But it won’t work.

Jesus: that’s the format I want to import but I Always get this "1 Titel - Artist 00:00"
Nomatter what separator I use it is always the same. Tracknumer and tracklenght is imported as expected, titel and artist are always combined. Note that tracklenght is not imported if you put the () around it.
Chirlu: I noticed and played with the settings but you have to use them all in order to import anything.

Leaves me with the question: why can’t I import from FreeDB? Closed?

5

There seems to be something weird with your characters here. After “Artist”, UniViewSVG 15 gives me:

0000 [control]
‎003A COLON
‎0030 DIGIT ZERO
‎0030 DIGIT ZERO

Maybe that’s to be expected? I don’t know much about character issues. But it sounds weird to me, and it’s different than what I get if I type " 00:00" in by hand.

1 Like
6

Yes. The current search server setup no longer supports searching FreeDB; the remaining UI bits will be removed in two weeks.

7

Sorry for the delay. For some reason my reply was rejected??
On topic: I suppose it came out wrong on your end or the website.
What I ment was: when I parse the info into the medium, what I get is: in col Number = a digit, in col Artist = the name of artist, followed with a separator with or without space(s) and the tracktitel, in col Artist = blank, in col Lenght = a time.
I know I have to switch titel and artist but that is something else.
Parsing of number and time is OK but I have/want to know what separator to use in order to get the artist and titel fields separated when parsing. Is it a dash, a dot, comma, or something else and with or without spaces???
THX

8

As @reosarevok wrote, the most likely reason it doesn’t work for you is that you have NULs in your strings. Normally, SPACE HYPHEN-MINUS SPACE should be OK.

9

Thanks Chirlu. When I read the reply from @reosarevok I began reading about those special characters, hex, dec, ansi, etc…
I did known something about it but as it turned out, not enough.
Now I cracked the problem using an hex-editor, I converted the ansi text from Notepad (windows) to utf8 and voilà…
No problem importing/parsing the text. But… now the format of tracklenght is not right for import in Musicbrainz.
Now I have to find another solution to take the format [00:00:00:00] of EAC into 00:00 to be accepted in MB.
Any solution there? I will try again tomorrow.
THX.

10

notepad++ is a useful text editor in windows that has a lot of tricks.
One thing that i find useful is alligning text so you can add or remove strings to multiple lines at once.
Hold alt and drag down will give you a cursor that wil work on multipe lines so you can add or delete characters all at once.

As you have [ as the timestamp format I would search and replace to put lots of spaces before so replace [ with " ["
Do this a few times so that the time string is past the end of the rest of the text.
Now press alt and drag down in the blank spaces between your track list and times on all lines of the file.
enter | (or another character not present in your text file).
You should now have “track name | [00:00:00]” in your file
Search and replace “| " to get rid of any space after the “|” character until everyhing is alligned.
Use alt and drag on the first characters and get rid of the extra hour column.
search and replace to get rid of the | character and replace this with a space.
Search and replace [ with ( and ] with ).
search and replace " (” with “(” to get rid of the extra spaces

You should now hopefully have what you want.

1 Like
11

Well, well, that’s exactly what I wanted to do today or tomorrow. Installed Notepad++ and FrHed a few days ago but need to learn how to use them. Thanks for the guide.
Going on the EAC forum also. I don’t think the output of text in EAC is as is should be. Loocking at the hex output of the .txt file from EAC there are indeed NULL characters all over. After converting to UTF8, filesize is only about 50% of the original. Now I know what to do the next few days.
Thanks guys.