Want to add a 30 CD compilation, but having some difficulties

Hey everyone,
I’d like to add a compilation of classical music into the database. But because of the Artists involved, I can’t!

I formatted an Excel sheet with the track names of all 30 CDs (366 tracks in total), part of it can be seen here: https://i.imgur.com/Fg3vwcD.png

I hoped, it would just add any artist not in the database so far as empty entry. But even with known artists, I have a huge problem: the tracklist says “You must enter a title and select an artist for every track.” and like shown on https://i.imgur.com/LcyBgqt.png it only shows a green name on two lines, because on both of the two lines I clicked on edit and just accepted the name again.

I really like to add that compilation, but it took me already quite some work to enter the track names in Excel. I do not want to spend a whole day in adding every artist one by one, then select the artists one by one for each of the tracks again, because the manual entry of the medium does not countercheck the artist instantly.

How can I do that easier?

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To at least speed up selecting repeated artists, you can do the following:

  1. Click on the “Edit” button
  2. Select the correct artist by clicking on the looking glass and choosing from the dropdown
  3. Set the checkmark next to “Change all artists on this release that match artist
  4. Click “Done” - This will repeat the choice you made from the dropdown for every artist with the same name
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That’s already helpful, thank you.
Unfortunately when I have several artists, it’s not possible:

I tried separated with , and with ; but in the end it always looks like this:

30CD’s! Good effort!

For several artist you need to use the little ‘Add Artist Credit’ button, as so:

multiple artists 2

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That is the manual way, yes. I hope, in the future the manual entry of tracks and artists allow to enter multiple artists at once, separated by comma or a semicolon :-/ guess I have some work to do then… a button “use these artists for all tracks in this medium” would be helpful too

well… finally done after a really long and tedious work… https://musicbrainz.org/release/5fc28f73-4ccf-4b38-b96e-a8e706f388e5

Some discs had disc IDs also used in other compilations, several weren’t known at all.

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You know https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Classical/Track/Artist ?

“The Track Artist field should contain just the composer; not the performer(s).”

[Not telling, I’m happy with the CSG (Classical Style Guide) at all.]

Welcome to MusicBrainz

Looks good! There will be a few things to fix, but that’s always the way with classical (for example ‘LC 00316’ is not the catalogue number, it is an identifier for the RCA company).

One thing that would have helped you a lot (sorry it’s too late) was to check that the recordings you wanted to add already existed in the database: if I check the first two CDs I see they were already published by Arte Nova as


and

If you had seen that before creating the release, you could have used the “Add medium” button then “Existing medium” tab to use the releases above and have everything pre-filled automatically for you!
Now we can instead merge the new recordings you created with the existing ones in order to deduplicate the information (so that all relations and dates appear on your release)

I started merging a few CDs where I found existing releases from Arte Nova. Some other probably don’t exist in the database, so we will have to add the missing information manually.

If you have scans/recording information somewhere (place, dates…), don’t forget to add them

But again, good job, we love to have new classical contributors who are ready to learn :stuck_out_tongue:

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I have written down all names I could find on the backside of the covers. I just didn’t knew how to add e.g. “soprano” to a person I had to add.

I would add an image from the backside as example, but the website does not allow me to.

Thank you for your support bows

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This is done on relationships, not when you set artists on release tracks.

See e.g. Recording “Gretchen am Spinnrade, D. 118” by Elisabeth Schumann, Gerald Moore - MusicBrainz for a recording featuring a soprano

You used Release “Classical Masterworks” by Various Artists - Cover art - MusicBrainz ? What error did you get?
Sometimes the Cover Art Archive that stores images is overloaded and rejects new images, but this is usually fixed in a few hours

No, I wanted to show an image of the backside of the covers to show, that this would be the only information I could enter. But I’m not allowed to post links to image hosters like imgur.

I’m just glad Mozart 225 (aka The New Complete Edition) is already present in MusicBrainz.

MusicBrainz has an associated, but independent, project for images of Releases.
It is hoped that the images stored there will be stable in the long term in ways that links to other sites like imgur may not be.
It is called Cover Art Archive.
And can be accessed through the Cover Art tab on Musicbrainz Release pages.

An image of the back coverart showing the tracklist is valuable in many ways.

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