12” Vinyl or just Vinyl for LP?

Should 12” only be used for singles or for all 12” pressings?

(I’ve started to add my vinyl collection… :wink:)

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Select 12" vinyl if the album is 12" in size. I have some 10" albums.

“Vinyl” is just a generic “I know its black, but don’t own a ruler” response.

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Okay, then for all, but not everyone seems to know that, because there are a lot of Vinyls and it’s probably not because they don’t have a ruler :laughing:

Thanks!

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There’s a bit of inconsistency in the way CD and Vinyl is presented. While rare, 8cm diameter CDs exist – but there is no corresponding 12cm entry – 12cm is presumed to be the “default” but there is no default diameter for Vinyl.

Not advocating for a change; just pointing this out.

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Often the source will not tell you. If you don’t hold the product in hand and reading it up online somewhere, you can’t set a size. This can be especially common if you are just trying to get an early release into the database for “release date” use.

Interesting how CDs are many and varied types of media (Enhanced, CD-R, Data CD, etc) but vinyl is just the sizes. And nothing to note colour and picture discs. I think CD is the default here as there is a huge percentage that is that standard 12cm silver CD. Whereas Vinyl splits more between sizes.

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Great ticket for improving this, been around a while :tada:

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I think that ticket shows why we don’t need this as an option. Someone in there suggesting a colour picker to select colours. A Yellow vinyl is Yellow. Or whatever it was sold as. Using a colour picker would mean you need to get monitor and scanners all colour matched correctly.

Adding Yellow Vinyl to an annotation is much easier. Especially as setting the colour of Marble Vinyl would be a little tricky. :rofl:

Current system looks just fine to me. Now where is my conversion table… I am trying to work out where to put this 3" CD.

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Unfortunately it is lacking a lot of options that I need, but they might be niche for others.

I don’t think anyone wants to see the current list bloated with all my lathe-cuts (an entry for each size of course!) a two step would be ideal:

Pick format > Pick format attributes

Then the format attributes picker can be nice and long and include all the weird stuff :+1:

Something like picture-disc has the same problem as lathe, you need to add 4 entries (or more), one for each sizing. The list gonna get long. This ticket would let us add all of 'em no problem!

Oh and I wanna track 33rpm and 45rpm which is important… I’ll stop before I get more carried away :smiley:

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I play mine at 33⅓rpm.

Optional Geek Out box I do understand. Would require a lot of back editing to catch up in the database. And then all the digital people would need FLAC, MP3, bitrates. I’m waiting for channel counts for my quad, 5.1 and mono recordings… but before then I still have a lot of music to add. :crazy_face:

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I’m sure if all album releases with format “Vinyl” were set to 12” there would be less than a 1% error rate. If you would exclude those with any inch mentioned in disambiguation or annotation you will be close to 100%.

That would be really great :slight_smile:
And colour and speed would be great too…

… we would soon have many more releases :sweat_smile:

However, I’m afraid we would still get a lot of format “unknown” without any further hints. :woozy_face:

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But I still prefer having 0% error rate with vinyl. :wink:

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That kind of fix is always a bad idea. Once you do that you can’t tell if it is set by the bot on a guess or set by actually checking. It will be much more than a 1% error as there are a lot of Singles set to Vinyl out there. Seems sensible enough to keep as it.

If anyone needs to, they can tweak it in their own tagging if required.

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I would never do such a thing! :innocent: … but I think I’m right :laughing:

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Currently, if one selects digital media and sets packaging to anything other than ‘none’, a warning message appears asking to check this.

I would envisage that a similar warning should be produced when selecting the medium, based on the total album length and number of sides. If an album is more than 35 minutes it’s going to be a 12" record, as that exceeds the length of two 10" sides, which were about 15 minutes. I think this would be practical as the database exists today, even if it’s a bit more difficult than the digital media warning.

The medium attributes discussed above would probably go a long way to enabling this, especially with regards to playing speed. Then we can think about mono/stereo/quad as well as the physical medium. At the moment it is quite inadequate for all of the weird formats out there. Also missing are the weird sizes that were popular in the 50s in the UK like numerous 8" records.

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More logical checks are always good and would help prevent releases with conflicting information. However, “unknown format” would not be prevented either and that’s what bothers me the most. It would be better if the field is mandatory but without a default. And “unknown” is at the bottom of the list for those rare cases where the format is really unknown.

@IvanDobsky, @jesus2099 ← What I wanted to say with my statistical thought experiment is: I don’t think most people are aware that they should select 12” for LPs. I wasn’t sure either and couldn’t find anything about it either in the guidelines or in the forum. At least that should have changed with this thread. :slight_smile:

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That’s already the case. A format has to be set unless one claims to have no clue.

A format is required. If you don’t know it, tick the “I don’t know” checkbox next to the format dropdown.

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Really? I’ve never tried to do so… (Thanks for the hint!)

And so this checkbox was intentionally ticked for all existing unknown formats? Frustrating…

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It depends when the release was added. The checkbox was introduced in February 2018:

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Understand. Most of the releases I’m thinking about were added earlier. This already implemented change will hopefully contribute to the fact that there will be fewer of them. :slight_smile:

This is my experience, especially as Discogs sets the standard in this area, and for them LP = 12".

I wonder what difference tacking the colloquialism to the MB list would make:

image

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