I’m assuming channels (for artists) and playlists (for releases) are fine, but is it okay to add the individual videos to recordings? If so, is that something that’s encouraged?
I ask because I’ve been working on a YouTube scraper library, and dogfooding it by moving my personal music collection into one codebase, which at its core is just a list of { artist MBID, track name, YouTube video ID } tuples.
The relevant part here is that I’ve automated the processing of an artist name into a list of { video title, video ID } tuples, and also made a start on heuristics for normalising ETI. So far it’s been a lot of manual refinement afterwards, but I’m hopeful that the human work necessary for the 99th percentile can be reduced to a few confirmations. (I’d also like to use the lists of works from MB to “pigeonhole” the output, but that’s purely theoretical at this point. And assumes the data exists and is complete.)
In any case, the correctness of my own library will always be my priority, so I can at least contribute those URLs to MB and update them when they rot (which seems to be often), even if my scraper is never published.
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YouTube videos should be linked to separate video recordings - these are linked “music video for” to the original audio recording.
Unless I missed something, it’s perfectly valid to link a MusicBrainz audio recording to a YouTube video via Relationship attribute / Video - MusicBrainz if it’s the same audio and doesn’t warrant the creation of a standalone video in MusicBrainz. The entire premise of the attribute is that it’s separate from the video flag on the recording itself. If the relationship attribute and the recording flag are supposed to always match, then the relationship attribute shouldn’t exist.
Every music video warrants the creation of a standalone video. It’s valid to link an audio recording to a YouTube video though if it’s one of those “audio videos” where the video is irrelevant and it’s just either a still image or something similar enough to one where the only priority is the music itself.
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To clarify, I’m not asking about music videos. I’m referring to videos automatically generated for YouTube Music—for example music.youtube.com/watch?v=14LAAU8H4Rc (= youtu.be/14LAAU8H4Rc).
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I think those definitely can be linked to the audio recording on MusicBrainz.
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Yeah, those certainly go on the audio recording, and possibly also without the video attribute since there’s no video there really.
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When I add these (including those circa-2008-windows-movie-maker slideshows of the artist with beautiful star wipe transititions) as just a “Stream for Free” link type, without the Video attrib.
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