Wikipedia

#1

I have a huge collection of SINGLES with no album, year, or cover art associated with them.

Most of the web sources expect entire albums in a collection to work well, so I have had about 50% success getting the data I need.

For the rest I'm doing a ton of manual entry and have noticed that the Wikipedia discographies are actually a decent source for manual reference. They include and albums table and also have a singles table where the album and year are shown.

My question before I go nuts writing a script to try to scrape this info is, has anyone else here tried or done this?

I'm a 100% newb to scripting in MP3Tag, but am not afraid (just free-time challenged!).

#2

I don't think this is possible. Web sources scripts rely on web sites with strict format rules for all pages. All band pages would have to have a table with the same headline and always have year and album title in the same rows.
But I think there are also many wikipedia pages, where the albums are listed in simple lists without tables. And there are more unregular things like pages for artist which were in several bands.

#3

Yeah, I started to notice the variances after posting here and continuing to work on manual entry. Ugh.

It's frustrating that all of the databases seem to think everyone has complete albums to look up.

If I had time I would fire up vb.net and write something. One could really break down and compare title and artist to a database in a number of ways to really get accurate matches.

Oh well... This could take a year or two of free time :flushed:

#4

The discogs scripts offer search per artist + title.

Your albums don't have to be complete to be tagged. In the web source preview window you can move your files up and down to leave the lines of the missing tracks empty.

In my discogs script (pone mod) you could also change the setting in such a way, that all track infomation is omitted, writting only tag fields which are the same for all tracks of an album.