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, confirmed before sending):

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 asks you to confirm before it makes any network call — see Confirmations.

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=...

Confirmations

Every write asks you first. A client that can show a confirmation prompt (Claude Code) shows one, with the entity, tags / rating / collection change. A client that cannot (claude.ai, Claude Desktop) gets a two-step flow instead: the first call sends nothing and returns a confirmation-required preview — the exact XML for tags and ratings, the method and path for collections — plus a confirmToken; only a repeat of the same call with that token submits. A token acts once, and changing any argument between the two calls invalidates it.

variable	default
MCP_CONFIRM_MODE	ask-user	What a write does on a client that cannot show a confirmation prompt (claude.ai, Claude Desktop). ask-user: two steps — the first call does nothing and returns a preview plus a token, and the model must get your approval in chat before calling again with it. auto: the same two steps, but the model may use the token after reviewing the preview itself. refuse: writes are refused on such clients. A client that can show prompts (Claude Code) always gets the real prompt, unless MCP_CONFIRM_ELICITATION=off. An unrecognised value is treated as refuse.
MCP_CONFIRM_ELICITATION	on	off never shows a confirmation prompt, so every client gets the MCP_CONFIRM_MODE behaviour. Set it for a client that says it can show prompts but never does (the write hangs — opencode 2.0.x). Any other value is treated as on, with a warning on stderr.
MCP_CONFIRM_TTL_SECONDS	600	How long a token stays valid.
MCP_CONFIRM_SECRET	random per process	Signing key; set it only if tokens must survive a server restart.

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.