Workflow for large classical compilations

[scotia]

Hi all,

I have a few 100 track classical compilations that I need to add to MB.

Do ONCE:

• Get tracklist from wikipedia and reformat to suit paste into manual track listing
• Create release in MB

Do per-CD:

• Add medium
• Paste correct tracks for the correct CD and import

Do per-TRACK:

• Read track lengths from booklet and type into each track listing in Tracklist
• Click on each Artist and bring up existing MBID (easy, normally the first hit in the pop-up)
• In Recordings, click edit.
• In another tab, search for one of the artists credited in the booklet, go to their recordings, and copy the link from the existing MB recording (NB, so far all of the tracks in the compilations are already in MB).
• Back in the new edit, paste the URL.

And that’s pretty much it - this process takes about 30mins. For a 100-track 10-CD compilation there goes 3 hours.

Can anyone suggest a better/programmatic way of accomplishing this?

[IvanDobsky]

Why hand typing the track times? Picard would upload those 10 CDs of track times for you much quicker. Or there is the script for decoding an EAC rip log.

Track times in booklets can often include typos anyway.

[Freso]

First of all, have you seen the “classical editor toolbox”? If not, check that out:

The Classical Editor Toolbox

This is a list of tools, tips and suggestions to make the life of a classical editor easier and the edits better. It’s intended for everyone interested in cleanup tasks, but most of it should be useful for everyone who edits classical releases at all. It’s by necessity a long post - don’t feel like you need to check it all in one go! (but you really, really want to be using scripts). If anything useful seems missing, reply with the info and I’ll probably add it here Asking This …

@scotia

Read track lengths from booklet and type into each track listing in Tracklist

If you’re adding Disc IDs, don’t bother with this, they will be added for you.

@scotia

In Recordings, click edit.

I know it’s generally better to reuse existing recordings (when you know they’re right), but if you want to cut down on time used, drop this step as well and consider using @jesus2099’s “mb. MASS MERGE RECORDINGS” userscript to merge recordings en masse after the release has been added:

Merge duplicate recordings between two editions of the same album with “mb. MASS MERGE RECORDINGS”

mb. MASS MERGE RECORDINGS Merges selected or all recordings from release A to release B Source code ← click the Raw button, there, to install Very old HOW TO on that obsolete version page ← don’t download/install from there! Known issues I think this is one of my oldest scripts. You will often find within a release group, two editions of the same album which tracks link to duplicate recordings. Merging recordings from those releases is very tedious to do manually. This script lets yo…

In the same vein, what I have sometimes done for multi-CD releases is to add each medium as its own release using a CD TOC/Disc ID lookup (from Picard, isrcsubmit.py, or other means) and then merge all the releases together at the end. If you know the full track listing though, it will probably be quicker/easier to use the track parser to populate the release and then add Disc IDs afterwards.

[scotia]

Old reply I know…

@Freso

I know it’s generally better to reuse existing recordings (when you know they’re right), but if you want to cut down on time used, drop this step as well and consider using @jesus2099’s “mb. MASS MERGE RECORDINGS” userscript to merge recordings en masse after the release has been added:

I’ve taken a quick look at the user script. It seems geared towards multiple releases in the same group (similar track number and sequence).

In the case of the 100 track release, it’s associated recordings are all over the place, across many other releases. Am I right in saying the Mass Merge script isn’t much help here?

Thanks

[jesus2099]

Yes indeed, this (MASS MERGE RECORDINGS) script is intended to be used between multiple editions of same album, with only slight variation of tracks, or between a compilation of several albums in same package and the actual albums (maybe it’s your case, here): you can align/shift tracklists with up and down keys, or you can type 13 to align remote tracklist track 1 to local medium 13 track 1, when the track selector is focused (it’s focused by default).

It can be used in other cases, with match titles button, but the result is very unsafe (less likely legitimate), and I discourage from doing so.