I’ve been entering Elgar: Complete Recordings, and basically what I did was (after confirming it didn’t already exist):
Add the release and the first disc
For each disc, see if it matched a disc ID already present. If so, confirm it’s the same and import the disc. Otherwise, type in the tracklist and add the disc
Add the discid. Rip the disc.
Once all ripped, use Picard to add AcoustIDs.
Scanned and uploaded cover art incl. the entire booklet.
This of course created a lot of duplicate recordings—except for the imported discs, they were all newly created. So I next went through each track checking the AcoustIDs to find duplicates. Then, if at least the performers matched and the times were close, I put in a merge. Some at least I got to do a bunch of tracks at once with the mass merge userscript.
It seems at this point basically I need to wait a week for all those merges to resolve. I don’t think I can add ARs yet because:
I don’t know which ones are needed—a lot will “suddenly” appear once the merges complete.
I’m not sure what’ll happen if ARs conflict (e.g., if I have a more-specific or slightly different date, or…)
Any that don’t auto-apply will close after the merge… and I suspect that means they’ll just fail.
Not sure if there is an easy (or at least not too painful) way to avoid entering the duplicates in the first place. Or a way to avoid the 7-day wait (well, I guess other than asking an auto-editor to approve them all). Also not ideal that the merges don’t have the conductor/orchestra/date/etc. on one side, making them harder to vote on.
You do not need to create new recordings when adding a release.
Find the existing release and copy and paste the url for the existing recordings in the input boxes on the add recordings tab when you create your release.
It is ok to add AR to the recordings now to either of the recordings as these are auto edits and these relationships will be copied when they merge,
When these recordings get merged it does tend to sort itself out and these relationships do get copied to the entry you are merging in.
If there are the same relationships you do not get 2 copies so you should not need to worry about this most the time.
Edits can occasionally fail depending on what you are doing.
If you are planning on removing a relationship you can remove this from the entry that will remain after the merge. If you are trying to remove a relationship from the entry that you are merging from this will fail as the entry will not exist,
Of course sometimes relationships could be entered slightly differently (e.g. with or without an attribute like “live” set). But in those cases the duplicate relationships can be removed later, keeping only the better one.
Yep, but then the problem is finding the recordings. morituri wants to match the tracks to MusicBrainz before ripping. That’s easy enough to disable, but I’ve found that makes it much harder to keep everything organized—e.g., much more likely to accidentally swap two discs, or two different discs’ track 2. I’ve had that happen to me before, and that risks bad data (e.g., AcoustIDs on wrong recordings) getting in to MB.
I wouldn’t care that much about potential duplicates. Especially duplicates with similar dates happen but it’s not that serious. Those all can be fixed afterwards either by you or someone else. I usually just add all the relationships and check afterwards if something needs to be fixed. I prefer to fix my own mess and I’m having a special bookmark folder on my internet browser just for entities I plan to check afterwards. Sometimes we have totally different dates and these are hard to fix when people use edit notes like “from booklet” when it would be more useful to see “booklet of EMI Digital CDC 547391”.
Conflicts could happen but those aren’t that common. You get notified by email (ModBot) about conflicts and can still make necessary changes. Always merge after adding relationships to have a lesser risk of a conflicts. Merge might get approved before but usually there’s so little amount of voters that these get approved in the same order as you entered them.
I’m happy to help with open edits (relationships) but auto-editors can’t approve destructive type of edits including recording merges. So with merges there’s going to be the usual voting process. I happy to help with relationships.