Anacronical pre-NGS warning when removing a Disc ID

MusicBrainz
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1

Pre-NGS, there was no release groups, only releases.
All editions with same tracklist were forming a single release with several release events (one per edition).
A release event was: one date, one country, one label, one catalogue number, one barcode.
So, different Disc ID for all those editions were added to this unique release.
Usually most of those edits would be without edit notes telling for which edition (release event) this Disc ID was.

In NGS (now) we have release groups and each release is only one single edition.
For releases added in NGS, there should be only one Disc ID (it’s extremely rare to find distinct Disc ID on a physically identical release).

But the migration of pre-NGS releases to NGS could not guess this Disc ID is for this or that edition (edit notes telling so were extremely rare, and anyway edit notes are free text).

So, when release events were migrated to split releases (those we now know), one release for each release event, and each release ended up with all the Disc ID from the pre-NGS release (all editions).

Now it is very welcome to cleanup and remove redundant unidentified Disc ID or to keep them in a vague catch-all release and adding well defined releases with unique Disc ID.

But there is a text displayed on the Disc ID removal page that seems to come from pre-NGS and that strongly discourage from removing any Disc ID:

You need to be certain that this disc ID was added to this release erroneously, since a release can have multiple valid disc IDs, and each disc ID can belong to more than one release. For more in-depth information about this topic, please see our CD submission guide.

This part “a release can have multiple valid disc IDs” was absolutely true pre-NGS but I don’t think it’s correct to say that today.

I feel the whole paragraph could be removed… :thinking:

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I look at way too many DiscIDs. I like my geeky manufacturing details. I agree with you this line could come out. It is very rare for a release to have two DiscIDs, but it does sometimes happen. Less than 0.5% on a rough guess though.

The part of the text that should stay is the bit that mentions a DiscID can be on multiple releases. This is pretty common as you see a glass master shared around. For Example, EMI would use the same disc in three plants in Europe and send it down to South Africa. I also have two Wish You Were Here releases, ten years between them in manufacturing, but still using the same DiscID.

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That was there because we didn’t use to care which plant for example pressed a release, and represses could get different disc IDs. By now, it seems we have moved more and more towards presses being separate if people care enough to separate them, which would probably make it uncommon to have more than one discid in a release? Although I feel it’s entirely possible still in many releases that do not have per-pressing splits.

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