Bug 300091

Summary: Year field not set when retrieving from MusicBrainz
Product: [Frameworks and Libraries] libkcddb Reporter: Bill Good <bkgood>
Component: generalAssignee: Richard Lärkäng <larkang>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: normal    
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Compiled Sources   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: http://commits.kde.org/libkcddb/a2d2a670fb5ac1a733f35b3358d00b8981a4a459 Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Bill Good 2012-05-15 20:11:47 UTC 
Building from kdemultimedia-4.8.3 sources (with Arch Linux packager).

When querying MusicBrainz with libkcddb, the year field isn't set. MusicBrainz contains a date field, so it's not for lack of MusicBrainz support. The CDInfo Year attribute isn't set in MusicBrainzLookup::lookup.

I started working on a patch, but discovered that the libmusicbrainz3 MusicBrainz::Release class that's used returns a list of events (http://users.musicbrainz.org/~luks/docs/libmusicbrainz3/class_music_brainz_1_1_release.html#adfa747f1d0836c5905ac90ce63dba9fb) instead of a single date. This makes sense, as an album could be released at different times in different locales. This raises the question of how to pick an arbitrary date to use for its year as our single year attribute.

My thought is to simply take the earliest date and use its year. Would that be acceptable? I'm not sure how else to handle it, short of user input. I suspect it would be fairly accurate...

Reproducible: Always
Comment 1 Richard Lärkäng 2012-05-15 20:38:37 UTC 
Your solution with choosing the earliest year would have been fine.
However, libmusicbrainz 3 is not working very well with the new schema introduced last year, so in the next release of KDE (4.9), I have updated libkcddb to use the new libmusicbrainz 4 instead.
I believe in the new schema, only one release date per release is possible, which would make the problem you describe go away.

See
http://users.musicbrainz.org/~luks/docs/libmusicbrainz4/class_music_brainz4_1_1_c_release.html
I would guess the CRelease::Date() only returns one date.
However, since it's a string I think it might return a full date, and not just a year (as a test case, you might try for example http://musicbrainz.org/release/04319e80-0948-4e89-8180-7cf6f17fc77a )

If you want to give it a try to write a patch, you are very welcome to do so, just ask if you have any questions. Otherwise, I might try to take a look at it, but it might take some time getting around to doing it. Since it should use libmusicbrainz 4, you should start from the code at
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdemultimedia/libkcddb/repository (the 'master' branch)
if you want to give it a try.
Comment 2 Richard Lärkäng 2012-06-05 19:56:21 UTC 
Git commit a2d2a670fb5ac1a733f35b3358d00b8981a4a459 by Richard Lärkäng.
Committed on 05/06/2012 at 21:45.
Pushed by larkang into branch 'master'.

Read year on Musicbrainz lookups

Add code for reading the year when looking up releases from Musicbrainz.
Added a test-case (musicbrainztest-fulldata), where the date
is "2011-04-29", which should be parsed as only "2011".

Also, while adding the test case, I ran into a bug, the titles
and track artists were always taken from the recording, while
ones from the "release credits" are preferred, fixed this as well,
and updated the other tests to reflect the fixes.

M  +25   -10   libkcddb/musicbrainz/musicbrainzlookup.cpp
M  +1    -0    test/CMakeLists.txt
M  +4    -4    test/asyncmusicbrainztest.cpp
A  +157  -0    test/musicbrainztest-fulldate.cpp     [License: LGPL (v2+)]
A  +32   -0    test/musicbrainztest-fulldate.h     [License: LGPL (v2+)]
M  +7    -7    test/musicbrainztest-severaldiscs.cpp
M  +3    -3    test/musicbrainztest.cpp

http://commits.kde.org/libkcddb/a2d2a670fb5ac1a733f35b3358d00b8981a4a459