So this one is somewhat odd as the Spotify and Apple Music releases are identical in every way except that track 1 had 9 seconds of silence removed from the track on Apple Music and also track 4 has 3 seconds of silence added on Apple Music.
Apple Music seems to be the only platform with these track times, but it appears to be almost the same as the physical CD release track times and all other platforms match the times on Extreme Music.
There is also a second digital version released in 2020 that keeps the same track time as Spotify, plus a different track 7, and this alternate release does not exist on Apple Music.
So I figure my options are:
- Split the release with annotations/disambiguations to show this discrepancy.
- Set the 2 tracks to ?:?? and add an annotation.
- Go with the Apple Music times as they are closer to the physical release and the alternate version has the same extended silence times.
- Use the least silence time from each and add an annotation.
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I am currently leaning toward #1, but I’ll see if this gets any replies by the time I feel like doing that.
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I usually do your option number 1. If they are within like 3-4 seconds I don’t take the time too, but 9+ seconds is a large difference, IMO.
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Sadly as I went to do this, it reached a new level of complexity.
It turns out that before the alternate version was released in 2020, Spotify (and probably others) had times similar to Apple Music. So, it appears that all platforms, except for Apple Music, somehow modified the tracks and broke their original release versions when they added the alternate version.
I do not know if they intended to remove the original version altogether but now they are in a weird limbo state where they no longer match either release.
If I were to split this still, would this warrant changing the release date? Does this even count as a new release if they broke it unintentionally?
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Sadly, this isn’t that uncommon amongst older releases. I check archives.org and look at the history of the release if it’s available to see if I can at least get a year of when it changed and use that as a release date. It’s usually because of hi-res, but that doesn’t appear to be the case with this release. Not sure why the master changed. If you can’t figure out the year, but you know it’s not the original digital master, you can always just leave the year blank and mention in the annotation about the differences.
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I hate that Deezer links don’t work 99/100 in TWM and the same goes for Spotify links between 2020 and 2023, which makes this quite difficult. The best I could scrape together was that the tracks were the old lengths up to at least March 2021 and then by November 2021 at the latest they were the new lengths.
At least I got a specific year but it’s quite odd that the breaking of the original release happened nearly a year past the alternate version’s release.
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If all it is is 9 seconds of empty space I’d leave them as the same recording, just add notes to the annotation to explain why some are longer than others.
Basically the recording you can hear is the same, it just has bonus silence attached. In the guidelines there is something about recordings being the same even if they fade out different. Or you could call it a “mastering” difference.
(I could find you plenty of examples of this)
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I had no plans to split the recording, just the release.
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