Wrong first release date on a-ha Hunting High and Low

Howdy!

I’m working on a tool to create NFO files for Kodi music videos and have made great progress thanks to community members here. However in the course of my debugging I hit a snag searching for a-ha’s “Take On Me”. The first release I’m looking for is the album “Hunting High and Low” which can be found here:

Unfortunately the recording data returned by

https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/recording?query="take+on+me"+AND+artist%3A"a-ha"+AND+type%3A"album"&limit=100&fmt=json

has that release-group with a first-release-date of ‘1984’ instead of ‘1985-06-01’ which means when I filter the releases none of them fall within the year.

For now I’m going to work on code to change the first-release-date to match the lowest date of the releases but I’m curious:

  • Can I edit the first-release-date directly?
  • Can’t a data pass be run to batch correct these across the database?

Thanks as always for this great site!
Chris

The first release date can’t be edited directly but is taken from the first release the recording appeared on.

If you look at the recording page https://musicbrainz.org/recording/12f65dca-de8f-43fe-a65d-f12a02aaadf3 you can see that it was released as a single in 1984.

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Yes but I’m referring to the release-group I linked, the recording you linked belongs to a different release-group.

Since I’m only looking for albums I iterate the recordings and sort the filtered array by release-date to find the first recording and release-group.

A recording doesn’t belong to a release group. It is linked to track’s on releases, and this recording appears on both the 1984 single and on the 1985 album “Hunting High and Low”. On the recording page you see a full list of releases this recording is linked to.

The recording has a first release date set from the earliest release, so 1984 in this case.

The release group also has a first release date. This comes from the earliest release inside the group, so in the case of this album it is 1985-06-01.

If you are looking for the first album release only you could query the details of the recording with releases and release groups included and filter the result by album types (and probably only those with official status).

https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/recording/12f65dca-de8f-43fe-a65d-f12a02aaadf3?inc=releases+release-groups

6 Likes

I gotcha, since I’m excluding non-Albums I’m not seeing that record. I just wrote code to re-calculate the first-release-date based on my result set and that’s working great. Sorry for the cofusion and thanks so much for your help!

5 Likes