Broadcast Guidelines

Ah, I see, that makes sense. I’ve spent a lot of time collecting programs from the BBC website. I think it’s the closest thing to an “official” release for a lot of these programs that aren’t popular enough to get on Audible.

I think opening things up to a more informal release style is extremely helpful. It’s exactly because of website like the BBC that I’ve ended up with so many random audio dramas and series, but those types of website are situated in such a odd place. What qualifies as a “release” when you are essentially talking about a massive nearly century old archive? I recently download Bertrand Russell’s Reith Lecture from 1947 off there. How am I suppose to enter that into MB :slight_smile: These new guidelines at least move towards clarifying those issues, and they do it cleanly as well. Plus, once the recordings exist in the database, we can easily create new releases in the future which are more representative of the initial broadcast information. So I don’t think the new guidelines would set anything back.

I’ve always suspected it came from a need to clearly differentiate rips of live music broadcast. So if you had multiple live broadcasts from the same program they wouldn’t overlap. I’m just surprised that broadcast date was never added to relationship types like recorded date was. I just find it anathema to other style guidelines on MB, it’s the equivalent of having featured artist or (live) in the track name. Titles are for titles, not for dates.

Yup, I’ve saw this listing when I was tagging Infinite Monkey Cage for my collection, and I think it’s the closest I’ve seen to a system that actually works. Theres still something slightly awkward about the naming convention for the releases though. I think the problem is that certain broadcast types just break the release conventions. Is “Infinite Monkey Cage” the artist, the series, or the release? My instinct is that’s the title of the release, and there are simply several releases with the same title but different content. Should they be under the same release group? It seems simpler, but I guess you wouldn’t strictly have to do it that way.

I use Jellyfin and Kodi for my music, but I’ve switched over to audiobookshelf for this type of content. I can’t praise it highly enough, it’s great for listening to audiobooks, podcasts, lectures, and audio dramas. It treats each episode as a chapter, remembers playback positions, and generally just works a lot better than plex for that type of media. It’s not as great for bigger series though, so I’ve had to split up a lot of releases into smaller seasons.

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