Bootleg guideline examples [done]

I emphasised that have not been released, here.
If it has not been released, is is really relevant for MB?

Well, that is exactly what I am trying to understand: when is something released in MB’s terms?

The item I marked for deletion:

has the same status as my collection of concert recordings.

Some would call those bootlegs, others would call a bootleg only when some company was trying to make money and press a CD out of it.

It really comes to what in MB’s terms is a release. In my own definition, I would never call a tape or CDR that is being copied all the time to share the music a release. If MB does, then my collection of concert recordings does belong on MB.

Tricky things are, for example, a tape of studio outtakes. I have many of those as well. Never released (in my definition), but often musicians just made a collection for a fan. And that gets copied an circulated.

Maybe it should be about the intention? The musician sharing a tape with some studio outtakes never meant it as a proper release. An audience recording, or even bands allowing fans to make a recording from the sound desk, is not meant as a proper release. (The Earth and Fire Live In Delft would fall under that category.)

(Sorry, I deleted my reply in error. Here it is again.)

To make it clear, the item I suggested for deletion falls into the same category. The question “is it really relevant to MB?” is the question I would like to have answered. If it is not relevant then the Earth And Fire bootleg should be removed. If it is relevant, then I can start making entries for everything in my 2 TB collection.

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well, what do you mean by “released”? MB’s guidelines for live recording bootlegs is looser than compilation bootlegs afaik. a “released” concert recording can mean “it was uploaded to archive.org”. but if they‘re your personal bootlegs that no one else could ever have access to, they wouldn’t belong.

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And that is a “Release” in MB language. Does not have to be something paid for. It has to be available and passed on.

As noted officially above:

There is a huge volume of live concerts and outtakes in the database. These are categorised as bootlegs so those who only want to look at shop purchased stuff can filter them out. Whereas some of us prefer the bootlegs. :grin:

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OK, it is clear to me now, thanks for the explanations.

It will be fun entering a huge amount of bootlegs then. (No sarcasm there, I mean it.) I never liked the format on etree.org so this is good. Thanks!

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I can vouch for the fun of data entry. I can be a little extreme and will fill the annotation with all kinds of notes about why this bootleg is different, what it holds. But then I like my historic data.

The best part of adding my bootleg collection to MusicBrainz is it made me go through it all. Some of it had never been played or looked at after it was downloaded. Now I have researched so much more about it which brings it all so much more to life. Found some right gems in there too, and fascinating history behind them.

Sharing data like this with MusicBrainz brought dormat parts of my collection to life.

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@IvanDobsky I agree. I am thinking of adding a lot of notes as well. I like historic data. I save everything with my files but having it publicly available (well, my list is online) is a good thing.
I hear you on going through the collection. I sometimes take an artist and browse through everything and delete stuff I will never listen to again because of the quality. Got me delaying to buy another set of hard disks. :slight_smile:

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A nice thing about how MB works is you can link those recording locations and add dates as actual relationships. I find it fascinating seeing who else has played at those same locations.

I used to be a concert files hoarder. Just heaping concerts onto a hard disk and forgetting they were there. Sorting them out, tagging, cleaning data and adding missing stuff to MB makes them all now so much easier to playback through my media centre.

I see MB as a perfect place to archive data like this. Fan websites can suddenly disappear, go offline, or drop away into the Internet Archive (if lucky). I’ve been surprised when a few of the bigger reference sites suddenly went offline which makes me all the happier at the work of adding this kind of information to MB.

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I started with Earth And Fire. Please have a look at the following I added:

(two versions)

and one I updated because the recording details were wrong and therefore the title:

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I’ve looked at Live in Ijmuiden 1972.
If you consider the recordings to be different, you should set different recording comments.

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Amazing work @jerry1970!

To expand on what @jesus2099’s note, if tracks like these are different recordings, they should be split, with the appropriate disambiguation: Recording “In the Mountains” by Earth and Fire - MusicBrainz
For context, take a look at the recordings page/tab, and imagine that some people browse or edit using this view.

Another thing to note is that how MB deals with ‘releases’ is quite specific, which means that you will often be adding a blank or much later release date for these bootlegs.

For instance, for Live in Ijmuiden, a digital media release with that cover wont have existed in 1972. Unless you know when that exact digital bootleg was ‘packaged’ for download you would leave the release date blank.

Since you are already proving to be a very conscientious editor, I will also nitpick your disambiguations, which are very slightly different to the guidelines (e.g. there should be a colon in there).

And finally, if you are adding lots of disambiguations, your hands will eventually fall off if you don’t use @bitmap’s ‘Set recording comments for a release’ userscript :smiley:
Find it here:
https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Guides/Userscripts

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@ jerry1970 I wish you a lot of fun doing this … it’s my habbit since years now doing this bootleg stuff for Bruce Springsteen and at the same time listening to all the songs on my NAS drive.
Waitung for retirement to be even more productiv in this area as it feels like a black hole …

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I see what you mean. It is not a mix in the sense they used two sources and mix the channels. Only some songs are from one source, other songs are from the other source. But I will make a distinction there. Thanks for the feedback

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I think I got this right now…

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