"Album" work?

MusicBrainz
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When I listen to music, I like to listen to the “canonical” album or a particular live performance as a unit. Often releases of studio albums contain bonus tracks that I don’t want to listen to every time I listen to the album. Similarly, live releases sometimes contain multiple performances/concerts/sets, but I want to listen to a single set.

I could deal with this by manually tagging things to get in the order I want, but I hope to write a music player built on the MusicBrainz data model that could support this style of listening. Ideally, I could play a whole release, the “album” from a particular release, etc.

I think I can handle the live performance part using Events. However, I haven’t seen a way that you can represent the “canonical” album directly. What I had in mind was to group the works that are “canonically” in the album as parts of a parent work.

  1. Is this an idea that appeals to anyone else?
  2. Is it something I can do with the existing model? i.e. leave the work type blank or pretend it’s a “song-cycle”
  3. Or is a change to support an “album” work type amenable?

Let me know if I didn’t explain that well.

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Would it work to just check for the tracklist of the first official release?

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Another option could be to fetch the “shortest” track list of the releases in a given release group (ie., the Release containing the lowest number of Tracks/Recordings).

Edit: And in case of multiple matches on this, it could sort by e.g., oldest or same release country as artist etc.

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In general, I think that would work. There may be some cases where the original release contained bonus tracks. But that certainly gets me closer.

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Your post reminds me two things that are not 100% what you say but that are related and could interest you…

Yes, I would like having tracksets one day, somehow.

I’m not sure it’s really about works, in my opinion.

You have that Song‐cycle thing I used in my work above.