Best way to get individual artists (Jazz albums)?

[bobkoure]

I'm currently going through my jazz albums, doing the following
- look up album on allmusic, add'l artists listed?
- copy/paste info (typically prose) into text editor, edit to semicolon-separated list of artists
- copy main artist into the albumartist field
- copy main artist plus contributing artists into the artists field

It's moderately daunting, but I really like being able to cross-reference artists. I'm just picking at the task. Should be done before the planet runs out of oil :-)

Anyway, I found myself thinking that I should start my own jazz-specific cddb repository, so other folks don't have to do the same drudgery... which leads me to wonder if somebody's already done this, or something else along the same lines.

Anybody know?
Thanks!

[zowie]

The information is not entered for many albums, but CDDB already accommodates sidemen. I use CATTRAX for cataloging (I have loads of analogue, so SB, iTunes, etc. wouldn't do the trick) and maybe 15% of jazz albums come up with sidemen filled in. A much higher percentage of classic rock albums come up with all the band members listed.

To make a long story short, CDDB is set up, although so far not so well populated. You'd just need to figure out how to pull the info in to the artist field, which shouldn't be real complicated but is beyond my skills.

[zowie]

One other thing -- when I have to enter the sidemen, I find it's easiest just to pull out the album and type them in.

[bobkoure]

...CDDB already accommodates sidemen

The problem, IMO, with CDDB is that much of the tag info is either misformatted or just wrong. When I switched to dbPoweramp some years ago the allmusic db was a major step up.

I agree that just going through whatever printed material that came with a CD is a good primary source of information, but getting those out is a major PITA for me.

I forgot to mention one of my steps:
- lookup each artist in my squeeze db, and either
-a- be sure to use that, capitalization, spacing, and accented chars included - exactly the same
-b- decide I got it wrong, so decide what's correct, change all the old tags (PITA!) and then use that

I've only done -b- a couple of times. Al di Meola comes to mind...

[zowie]

The problem, IMO, with CDDB is that much of the tag info is either misformatted or just wrong.

Yes. But you'll have that problem to one degree or another in any open-contribution database. Discogs tends to have a more careful users.