Capitalisation of Nine Inch Nails releases

I suppose you’re right about EAC(?). Never mind that argument, then.

I still think that Spotify has the correct title case, as intended by the artist, because the artist provides the titles for them to use. With bigger artists, perhaps not, but I doubt anyone here knows the specifics of how that works.

I’ll revisit an idea I posted earlier, for MB to have a ‘Raw title’ and an ‘English title’ with all the corrected style that is wanted. With that, anything that sources metadata from MB would be able to choose depending on user preference.

Spotify is a bad example. It is a shop, they don’t care about the artist. I don’t use it so can’t check, but it is likely to just follow the messy Discogs idea of All Caps All Of The Time Everywhere.

That also breaks down as Spotify may differ to iTunes who is different to Deezer etc. A guideline like this brings things into a sensible neat order.

Look at the Wikipedia link above. English Title Case is a Thing. It is not just made up by MB to annoy you. An English Language teacher would explain it better. Look through enough of your CDs and you’ll see the chaos going on. You’d have many MANY ALBUMS IN ALL CAPS all over the place in your collection. And WHAT DO YOU DO WITH SOMETHING WRITTEN LIKE THIS? Using those title case guidelines brings order to chaos.

We kind of do know how it works - I have uploaded releases to Spotify and other digital storefronts for a (small) label. I’ve never called the artist to ask how an ‘a’ should be capitalised. I doubt NIN is going to get that phone call from Universal/Interscope or whatever, whenever their back catalogue is uploaded to the next online storefront by an employee.

Even if the artist did upload it themselves I would still not assume that the artist cares or knows about Title Case vs Camel Case :sob:

I understand the frustration, it would be great if everyone was capitalising stuff purposefully, but the reality is that few people are. That is why MusicBrainz applies a clear guideline, so at least when something on MB is capitalised weirdly you know it’s meant to be. As mentioned, if you can find any indication that NIN really made an artistic decision to have every word capitalized then ‘artist intent’ overrules the guideline, which is great.

Yes!!
This is an amazing idea for sure, because it’s the most requested feature in MB’s ticket tracker :smiley:

6 Likes

This is an amazing idea for sure, because it’s the most requested feature in MB’s ticket tracker :smiley:

Bugger.

1 Like

Let’s take the Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D album, for example.

The official NIN wiki says:

The Beginning Of The End

Back cover and official NIN website show:

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Booklet shows:

the beginning of the end

It shows that there is absolutely no artist intent as to write the titles either way.

It’s for this kind of reasons that MusicBrainz has guidelines to not let give user/editor the hassle of the choice:

The Beginning of the End

10 Likes

It’s clear that the latter two are stylised variations of the actual title. All the text, including the bits outside of the titles are capitalised the same. Don’t be ridiculous.

Nothing To Fear by Oingo Boingo. Recently, this album was remastered. The website clearly shows the album title and song titles:

This debate is ridiculous. Musicbrainz is used for metadata by most everything - you ought to be providing accurate data, not editorialising and damaging the integrity of data.

That website just seems to show their own style across their sales pages. Follow the Discogs link on Nothing to Fear and you find the CD cover is in ALL CAPS FOR EVERYTHING. Which is the case for many of these releases when you track to CD boxes.
image

Only a Lad would be a better one to pick as the art is here at MB

It is just another shop applying their own style on an ALL CAPS TRACK LIST.

There is a plugin for Picard that will swap to the All Caps Style if you prefer it? “Smart Title Case”.

3 Likes

What is the debate?

If you can think of a guideline that you think would be better, and covers all these cases (and the rest…), post it here. Then we can debate it.

You’ll find it’s not so easy - in this discussion we’ve brought up packaging, online stores, CD metadata, and websites… Which one takes precedence? I can find a different example of caps for the oingo boingo album at each of those sources.

How do you pick one without ‘editorializing’?

Or maybe you have been suggesting something else that I’ve missed?

Honestly, your frustration is valid. The current system is imperfect. But is a perfect one possible when dealing with this kind of data? I think unlikely. Multiple/alternate tracklists will help, but even then which one to default to will be cause for heated discussion :dizzy_face:

14 Likes

I would be very happy with alternate tracklists. It doesn’t seem like it’ll happen, though: “Created: 2012-03-29 19:13”. Applications that source metadata would be able to choose which they would use. The default doesn’t really matter to me.

I just wish I didn’t have to edit the titles on all my music in Plex to match what I consider to be the proper titles. It’s indeed highly frustrating. I could use local metadata, but everything else sourced is largely perfect, and I do want to contribute to making everyone’s metadata more accurate.

1 Like

The backend code for this has been in MusicBrainz for a while (something that can only be done once or twice a year, during schema change releases), there “just” needs to be frontend code added for it (which is something that could happen at any time).

Also note that several issues created in 2012 or earlier were fixed this year: Loading... – the reason we use a ticket tracker is exactly so that old issues won’t be (entirely) forgotten.

2 Likes