Broadcast Guidelines

[diskotechjam]

@aerozol

In this case it’s not arbitrarily grouping broadcasts - it is grouping the files as they were ‘released’ digitally here: BBC Radio 4 Extra - Fear on 4, Series 1 (digital release date unknown and left blank)

That it offers guidance for entering a bogus series or podcast grouping is a side-effect, but I wouldn’t use any as an example (e.g. the Goons release mentioned earlier).

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.

@aerozol

If it’s not helpful for your issues (bummer) all I can probably ask is that you let me know if these guideline changes make things worse for you

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 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.

@aerozol

(Side note 1: The long release/title naming syntax made zero sense to me previously, but I’ve come across it in other situations enough now to realise that MB probably didn’t pull it out of thin air. A popular audio file sharing site I’m looking at, right now, doesn’t have naming styles for broadcasts but often titles are as follows: ‘BBC WS - Dec 04 2004 - The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker’, ‘2015.10.31 - Fright Night - Ring.mp3’. This means that a lot of people do find it useful to name their files this way. I’ve since become less confident about scrapping the format… but perhaps you or others have more insight, and thus the confidence to request a change. The MB community may agree!)

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.

@aerozol

(Side note 2: A previous proposal of mine from years back was to group episodes under a ‘season’ or ‘series’ release group, particularly for podcasts, but it didn’t get anywhere then. There’s still a couple of examples floating around that I meant to fix… I still don’t think it’s a bad idea, looking at that now, but it also shifted a MB definition too much - ‘release group’ - and got a lot of pushback)

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.

@aerozol

(Side note 3: Just wondering, do you use Plex or something similar? I usually have no problem with individual releases with the long titles. But Plex makes a real ham when displaying it all… almost impossible to browse when I’m on the go)

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.