Anything you type in the song search field in mbzlists will do the most sensible search across track names, artists, and releases via MusicBrainz API. In case this is not getting you what you want, you should consider using advanced search.

Songs in MusicBrainz are stored with fields like artist, country, release (similar to album) etc. You can use them in your searches by adding text like AND <field>:"term here" in your query.

As an example, if I am not happy with the results of searching yellow coldplay, I could try searching for yellow AND artist:coldplay. Note that surrounding the field search query with ” is important for multi word queries. Here are a few more example searches:

  • electrical storm AND release:best

  • choo AND artist:"local train"

For now, we only recognize the search to be advanced search when you are searching for at least artist or release.

The search syntax is basically run on the Lucene backend. To make more complex queries, check the documentation here. See this page for list of all fields that you can use in the search to narrow the results down.

Since MusicBrainz is a community curated metadata database, sometimes you might end up with slightly incorrect (or missing) metadata as there could be many duplicates and variations (specially for releases). In that case, please consider contributing to the database by going here.

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