The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobook is spread over five books and twenty five CDs. These books were converted to Audiobooks many years ago.
The tracks are named based on the first line of the text of each section. This is how they are named in the booklets. And have been named like this by Douglas Adams fans ever since.
There are edits trying to wipe this out and replace with generic “chapter 5, part 2” text instead. Because of a guideline written after these releases had been entered into the database.
The Artist’s Intent is the titles as they are currently entered. But I don’t own these copies, and I am trying to find booklets to show the original titles as used. Not surprisingly for hard to find releases there are not many images for this.
Meanwhile hours of work are about to be deleted: https://musicbrainz.org/release/79f8ddff-8578-4b46-b9e8-9be9f90154da
How does this improve the database?
Surely this is not the intent of the guideline to delete the actual track names?
Edit where a discussion is happening: Edit #110685790 - MusicBrainz
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This is how they are named in the booklets.
But I don’t own these copies
Fortunately I do and posted photos that contradict this.
The Artist’s Intent is the titles as they are currently entered.
Evidence this was a choice on the part of an editor:
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/7875965
Where can I find these photos contradicting this?
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The text in the quotes come from the booklets themselves. I have seen this before with my own eyes, but don’t own this box. It was common on old BBC audiobooks. I have not had time to find examples, already spent hours looking hard through many DNA at MB, Discogs and EBay. The few scans there are don’t go much beyond front and rears. I know this as I sourced many of the images in MB myself as I have spent months of work in the DNA section here bringing huge chaos into order.
I will scan in booklets of other DNA works I own that show this style of naming the sections of the recordings.
For now the quickest place I can show this style is with a BBC Audio Play of The Goons from “The Goon Show, Volume 9: What Time Is It Eccles?”:
Here is that style of a quoted line. In the DNA examples these lines are actually in speechmarks in the booklets which is why someone added the speechmarks here too.
I believe the example edit of cjk32 quoted above is trying to add the chapter numbers to the text as printed. This is why they point to that opera style as it is Chapter x: “Track title”. Notice how they say “in the absence of chapter names” Not that they lacked the track titles.
Ask this: Where else would that title text come from if it was not being read from a track list in the booklet?
Later reissues of this book changed the split of tracks, and therefore changes how the tracks are named. This is why many of those have the standard ‘‘Chapter X, Part Y’’ naming.
I am glad to see the preserving of this original work with the psuedo release as I was about to do that myself.
I still strongly believe Artist Intent here is showing track names as in the actual booklets. Just no one has ever scanned these booklets from this hard to find set. The only images in MB are of fronts, rears and mediums. No DNA booklets
(FYI: DNA = Douglas Noel Adams. Quicker to type)
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