Guide to using

[andrewbaxter]

Hello, this is pretty cool. I'm new to both harmony and musicbrainz editing in general, but I have a lot of music on bandcamp and would like to get some of that metadata via musicbrainz and this seems to be the way to do it.

Is there a general "here's how you import stuff" guide? I'm going to open separate discussions for specific issues I had, but I'd just like to confirm if I was in using this at all in the expected way in the first case.

The readme has a usage guide for people wanting to run the server themselves, not use the server. The musicbrainz thread is very long but seems to discuss features and bugs, but not a general usage guide either.

[arsinclair]

Personally, I found Harmony to have a quirky behaviour when importing from bandcamp per se. The importer userscript is currently much more stable IMO: https://github.com/murdos/musicbrainz-userscripts#bandcamp_importer

However, Harmony is developing rapidly and quickly gaining features that the userscript doesn't have, for example from the very recent is the auto-detection of Soundtrack releases.

Also, you will discover over time that there's quite a broad landscape of userscipts for all imaginable use cases. In order to save you some time in the future you can take a look at the curated list here: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Guides/Userscripts. I can definitely recommend a must-have Enhanced Cover Art Uploads, which is the best tool to import cover art from a variety of sources.

As for importing with Harmony per se, I think the workflow is pretty straightforward: paste the bandcamp URL into the Provider field, press Lookup and see if this release is already imported to MusicBrainz. If it doesn't exist, then import it. Sometimes the release might already exist on MB while not being linked to bandcamp (could have been imported from other sources), so pay close attention to the Duplicate Search results in the MB interface as well.

[kellnerd]

Personally, I found Harmony to have a quirky behaviour when importing from bandcamp per se. The importer userscript is currently much more stable IMO

@arsinclair When you say "quirky", do you mean any of the known issues and feature requests or something else? Please create a new issue if something else is missing or misbehaving 🙏

[arsinclair]

To be honest, I haven't had time yet to sit down and read through the issues. :sigh: But I must do so, sooner or later. I recall 7-8 months ago I evaluated Harmony as a Bandcamp importer and determined that the scripts were more stable. However, I haven't tried it since then, so most of the issues might already be resolved.

@kellnerd, I wanted to ask you for some time: how do you see the future of the importer userscripts? Do you think once Harmony has all the features the importer user scripts will become a thing of the past? Or there's still a specific angle, which Harmony won't be able to scale up to?

[kellnerd]

I think the userscripts will still have their niche, some people prefer them over a separate importer web page (or are unaware of alternatives).
Personally I'm keeping the Bandcamp (and soon the Discogs) userscript for the injected icons that indicate which entities exist in MB alone. That would be impossible to replace one-to-one.

[kellnerd]

I'm new to both harmony and musicbrainz editing in general

I would recommend you to get familiar with manual editing practices first. Once you have mastered that, you will start to worry about editing faster and release importers are one answer. They basically only prefill the release editor page, everything else is still the same workflow. (Cover art still has to be added in a separate step, for example.)

Harmony itself has no user documentation beyond the landing page and the supported providers so far. Contributions to improve that are very welcome, my little time usually goes into the more complex tasks.

The musicbrainz thread is very long but seems to discuss features and bugs, but not a general usage guide either.

You can also ask questions there, it's a support thread after all, and it probably has more visitors than GH.