io.github.chrischall/musicbrainz-mcp

musicbrainz-mcp

An MCP server for MusicBrainz, the open music encyclopedia. It gives Claude live access to MusicBrainz metadata — artists, releases, recordings, labels, works, and more — plus Cover Art Archive images, and (optionally) lets you submit your own tags, ratings, and collection edits.

Developed and maintained by AI (Claude Code). Use at your own discretion.

Tools

Read (no credentials required):

Tool	What it does
musicbrainz_search	Search any entity type with a Lucene query; returns ranked matches + MBIDs
musicbrainz_lookup	Look up an entity by MBID, with inc subqueries for linked data
musicbrainz_browse	List all entities linked to another (e.g. every release by an artist)
musicbrainz_cover_art	Cover Art Archive image URLs for a release / release-group
musicbrainz_resolve	Turn a pasted musicbrainz.org URL into its entity
musicbrainz_healthcheck	Verify connectivity and whether OAuth writes are configured

Write (OAuth, confirm-gated):

Tool	What it does
musicbrainz_submit_tags	Apply user tags to an entity on your account
musicbrainz_submit_rating	Set your 0–100 rating for an entity
musicbrainz_modify_collection	Add/remove entities in one of your collections

Each write makes no network call without confirm: true; it returns a dry-run preview first.

Every read above takes a view, except musicbrainz_cover_art. It defaults to compact, which strips image and avatar URLs — a subtractive rule, so it cannot drop a field nobody knew was there; view: "full" returns MusicBrainz's payload untouched. musicbrainz_cover_art takes none on purpose: the image URLs are its answer, and stripping them would not shrink the response, it would empty it.

Install

This is a Node MCP server (stdio). Point your MCP host at it:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "musicbrainz": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "musicbrainz-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Reads work immediately. MusicBrainz asks clients to make at most one request per second — the server throttles itself to stay within that limit, so large browses are paced automatically.

Enabling the write tools (optional)

1. Register an application at musicbrainz.org/account/applications (redirect URI urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob).
2. Complete the OAuth flow with the tag, rating, and collection scopes to obtain a refresh token.
3. Provide these via your MCP host's env (or a local .env):

MUSICBRAINZ_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID=...
MUSICBRAINZ_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET=...
MUSICBRAINZ_OAUTH_REFRESH_TOKEN=...

Development

npm install
npm run build
npm test

See CLAUDE.md for architecture and docs/MUSICBRAINZ-API.md for the pinned API shapes.

License

MIT. Data from MusicBrainz, licensed under CC0 / CC BY-NC-SA.