[mb-devel] albunack.net - Combined MusicBrainz/Discogs discography and Discogs Release Importer/Linker site

[Paul Taylor]

For years Ive wanted to something to make it easier for editors to get
data into MusicBrainz from Discogs in some form or other but never
seemed to have the time. In the past I found the Import Discogs
Greasemonkey Script quite useful but the major difficulty has been
finding releases to add in the first case, and Geordi did not quite get
to what I was hoping for so in the last month I have been working on
something and now I have beta available as:

http://albunack.net

The idea is you look up an artist and it shows you a combined
Musicbrainz + Discogs discography, showing releasegroups/release and
tracks on a single page. This makes it easier to see gaps in the
Musicbrainz which could be filled by data from Discogs, and makes it
easier to add that data:

It shows any existing links between MusicBrainz and Discogs matches.
It also matches up Musicbrainz releases without a Discogs link to
potential Discogs releases and lists these matches together with a
*Link* button to seed a MusicBrainz Edit release.
It provides an *Import* button to seed a MusicBrainz Add Release from
other Discogs releases not linked to Musicbrainz

Currently it *only* shows releases where the artist is the only album
artist credit (i.e we dont list collaborations, nor Various Artist releases)

Of course, the user still has to make decisions about the data and check
the data before submitting anything to MusicBrainz, and everything still
goes through the edit system.
I also have various report data currently in the form of SQL tables that
I plan to add to the site as reports.

All the data is provided by by my own webservice and no calls to
Musicbrainz webservice are made. The only disavantage being that the
data is cached so if you add or link a release that won't be reflected
until I next rebuild the database from MusicBrainz, this is planned to
be weekly, but more random that that at the moment.

I've been testing it out (with Firefox) and its been working well for me
(except rather slow for looking up long-established artists with
thousands of releases and track listings of multi-disc Discogs releases
- so perhaps ignore those for now, ) , so I hope you like it and that it
will be useful for MusicBrainz editors.*I would appreciate some some
feedback from you before publicly announcing it.*

I can't currently make the website open-source but I've put some
rendered pages into a bitbucket project together with bug tracker
https://bitbucket.org/ijabz/albunack-website/ for raising any issues.

Paul/ijabz

[Paul Taylor]

Post by Paul Taylor
For years Ive wanted to something to make it easier for editors to get
data into MusicBrainz from Discogs in some form or other but never
seemed to have the time. In the past I found the Import Discogs
Greasemonkey Script quite useful but the major difficulty has been
finding releases to add in the first case, and Geordi did not quite
get to what I was hoping for so in the last month I have been working
http://albunack.net

Sorry to anyone trying to use this this evening, the server was
struggling my testing has all been done with just a single user
accessing the service at any time. Ive now made some improvements to the
configuration, that should hopefully resolve the issue.

Paul

[Paul Taylor]

Post by Paul Taylor

Post by Paul Taylor
For years Ive wanted to something to make it easier for editors to
get data into MusicBrainz from Discogs in some form or other but
never seemed to have the time. In the past I found the Import Discogs
Greasemonkey Script quite useful but the major difficulty has been
finding releases to add in the first case, and Geordi did not quite
get to what I was hoping for so in the last month I have been working
http://albunack.net

Sorry to anyone trying to use this this evening, the server was
struggling my testing has all been done with just a single user
accessing the service at any time. Ive now made some improvements to
the configuration, that should hopefully resolve the issue.

Just an update, the server has been stable processing requests fine for
the last week.

Made a modification today so for MusicBrainz releases that arent
currently linked to a Discogs release and that Albunack could not find a
potential Discogs link for there is the option to add a link to a
Discogs release of your choice. Then Albunack will start an Edit Release
session for that release with Discogs releaseid seeded as an external
link AND extra information found in the Discogs release but not found in
MusicBrainz also seeded (such as catno. barcode) .

I added this option because often when browsing the discography you can
see often probable links that were not picked up by Albunack because of
minor differences in data , after checking the releases it is easier to
add the extrav data via the button than doing it manually.

Paul