Hi folks, got a question that is similar to ones that I see have been asked before but without wanting to get into PuddleTag I’d like to try and keep things simple going forward by hopefully just being able to use MP3Tag to keep my library in order.
I’ve had a library in Kodi for years now but the other day decided it was finally time to scrape for artist info and thumbnails using the inbuilt Universal Album Scraper. This went relatively well except some of the lesser known artists have been replaced by complete mismatches. Apparently adding the Musicbrain IDs for albumartist would solve this, I’ve already added it manually to a bunch of tracks by the same artists, rescanned and it worked, so now looking at a way to automate this proceedure.
I’ve found the Musicbrainz expanded scripts from [WS] MusicBrainz expanded but the bare minimum I can scan with is artist+album. I simply want to add the matching albumartist ID tag to every track I have by that artist. Can it be done?
I wrote the expanded MB scripts, and Yes, I know it can be done technically.
But No, you can't do it without modifying the existing scripts.
And No, you can't automate the process so that you can select thousands of your tracks, press a button, and have everything done automagically.
Most of the web source scripts are designed to search the metadata of tracks on a specific album. (MusicBrainz refers to these as "release").
Therefore the search by artist and album. Or albumartist + album (or catalog number or barcode or MB AlbumID).
This is the most effective method of obtaining the perfect metadata for your local album.
You can select all tracks you have by one specific artist.
Then you can manually set the MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID for all these selected tracks at once like this:
Then you save it and use it in your 3rd party tools.
Thanks for the responses. As I said in the OP I’ve tagged an artist’s releases with their unique MBID as a test and seen it work, so I’m aware that’s an option. I just don’t have the time or patience to sit through the amount of artists I would have to tag. Hence the automation.
I guess I’ll have to look into some form of Python scripting to achieve this.
Please don't forget that Python, like any other language, does not solve the underlying problem:
How can the one and only matching MBID be found automatically for the artist/band "Eclipse" when there are about 50 different bands at MB with the same name?
(Fun fact: Some of them even have released an album with the same name called "Eclipse" )
You would need to find a way to be perfectly sure that every track is linked to the one and only correct artist and then find the correct MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID GUID for exactly this artist at MusicBrainz.
100% agree that's what the problem is, I possibly misguidedly thought someone may have created a script which suggests the most likely artist match but also provides the option to override it if incorrect.
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