[mb-devel] XML query problem

[flabbergasted at gmx.de]

Hi,

I sent the following mail to the Musicbrainz support and got the advice 
to ask this here. I hope I don't bug you too much with my problem. You 
already do a great job!

I have an application where I want to query Musicbrainz to find the
corresponding album to a given track.

This works quite nicely in general via the XML interface:

http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/track/?type=xml&artist='artist'&title='title'

The problem is, though, that the release tag in this result doesn't have
a "type"-attribute so it's not possible to see if the first result is
just a bootleg or a compilation (which sadly enough happens quite
often). Is there a reason why this is not provided here?

The only thing I can think of to do is to check the releses one by one
on their type which is kind of tedious. Or is there a better way that I
can't see (I also thought about something as getting a list of all
official albums by the artist and then checking if the releases are in
this list. But this still is a problem with artists with many official
releases like "The Beatles").

I think the easiest way would be to just provide the type-attribute for
releases in the track query. I don't think this should be hard to do and
maybe you just forgot?

Thanks a lot for providing this service!

Tobias Fritz