I) (2013-08-06, 09:49)olympia Wrote: For the Universal Album Scraper you indeed need to link directly the MusicBrainz release page. The wiki page you linked is unfortunatelly wrong. Not sure who was creating it, I will get it fixed as soon as I find the time for it. Allmusic and Discogs link will not work. Discogs is not supported by the scraper at all, while it fills some database fields from allmusic, but only if the allmusic link is available on MusicBrainz. The ONLY supported site for 'Album Review' is theaudiodb.com (what you can edit yourself as well), so you are not getting the review from wikipedia. Once again, Album Review is not available from allmusic or last.fm or from anywhere else, only from theuadiodb.com. Not sure what you mean on imperfect thought...
Roger that Olympia,
Thanks for the explanations and follow-up on the wiki corrections that for sure will help many users stuck at the moment with this. The reason why it appeared as I was getting a wikipedia-scraped review is due to the fact that someone actually pasted the whole wikipedia review (and link) along with the BBC review (and link) as theaudiodb.com review for the generic album 'Bad'. That explains it. The imperfect 'thought' was just a typo, no worries.
My understanding is that a generic review of an original release should be good for all the following releases; however there are very important facts particular to some releases that could go from a regular masterisation to actual meaningful changes at the editing desk. These are usually stated as further reviews or notes to the specific releases. Theaudiodb.com doesn't seem to be purpose-designed to allocate multiple releases besides the main original release, which I think makes things easier in many ways and I support that; there is no way to scrape any other site that could have these information available also.
Knowing the above, would it be possible to add to the scraper/skin an extra field called 'Release Notes', 'Notes' or 'Comments', on the Information screen? Whom should I direct my request to? It could be located between 'Review' and 'Search on YouTube'. To save space, the latter could perhaps be shown just as 'YouTube' or 'On YouTube' ?? Alternatively, it could also be displayed on the 'full screen' under 'info' or as an extra field scrolling sideways right under 'Moods', from drop-down menu 'Extra Info' (View image below). The info presented on this notes could be any information the user would like to manually add to a tag called <notes> or <comments> (which already exist as a standard tag in many taggers) when writing the album's metada (Picard, The Tagger, etc.) or in the album.nfo if a corresponding field <notes>/<comment> is provided for this purpose, besides the url that would take care of pulling in the reviews and all extra info. These notes could contain useful technical info for the listener to look for, as you can see in the example below for 'Bad' (Reissue 1994):
<This re-issue of 'Bad' features a number of changes when compared to the original 1987 release: "Bad" has a modified horn arrangement. "The Way You Make Me Feel" has richer vocalizations and background vocals. "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" omits Michael Jackson's spoken intro. "Dirty Diana" is replaced with the 7-inch edit of the song. "Smooth Criminal" omits the dramatic breathing within the intro.>
II) (2013-08-06, 09:49)olympia Wrote: I believe if you link the different releases from MusicBrainz via album.nfo that it should be OK, I never tested this though.
Tried album.nfo pointing to different releases in Musicbrainz to no avail. They keep being gathered and mixed-up into one-album view. The only method that has worked for me so far is retagging each release with a manually-forced different name via Picard.
III)
1) The list of tracks on the lower-left corner whilst on 'Info view' (see image above), does it have any other practical function than showing the names of the tracks, or is it just a plain list of tracks with no possibility to select one of them for playback or extra info?
2) There is no time info (track length) for some songs (2nd song, picture above); is the scraper failing to retrieve this info for certain tracks or is this a skin display issue? Any way to fix this?
3) The presence on the album name of certain punctuation symbols such as ", stops the scraper from finding the musicbrainz release and gets back no info (e.g., see image above with 'The 12" Mixes' album). A manual refresh deleting these symbols from the album name throws 100% success. Perhaps this has been worked for the next release? If not, would it be possible for the scraper to automatically strip from the album name any known "illegal" or incompatible character before initiating the API call?
Looking forward to your reply. All best,
CF