On the topic of ETIs, some like it some don’t — I like 'em, what I don’t like is how (and why?) ETIs are cased, specifically: “the other parts of this extra information should be in lower case except for words that would normally be capitalized [1] in the language.”
Although it does show consistency (thanks to style guideline), to me it still looks strange and to an outsider he might think: "why the 2 different types of capitalization, is it a typo?
For this, I have my own set of Text transform settings I created in TagScanner
[1] -ise spelling is from French (…) there is no reason why in English the special French spelling should be followed, in opposition to that which is at once etymological and phonetic." Greek-derived spellings
Basically the train of thought is “it’s a descriptor, not the title, so it shouldn’t be cased as if it was a title”. I think it’s much more aesthetic, but then, my native language doesn’t do title caps, so I might be biased
I don’t use title caps outside of MB either.
But you have to imagine the ETI is between parenthesis (rounded brackets like this), so TitleCaps would look funny in those, wouldn’t they to you ?
Adding on to @reosarevok’s comment, it should also be noted that sometimes parts of ETI is title cased. E.g., “Freso’s Super Amazing WubWub remix” has the “Freso’s Super Amazing WubWub” title cased, because it’s an actual title (and also probably artist intent). Things like “radio edit” isn’t a title though, but, as @reosarevok said, simply a descriptor.
OK, let’s take an absurd example for instance:
I Like to Move It (DJ Dero NRG remix) <- real title
I Like to Move It (and I Like 2 Remix It 2) <- imaginary, read as (and I Like to Remix It too)
Guess case would catch ‘Remix’ and lowercase it, which isn’t correct. It’s no longer a descriptor but part of the title…
To an outsider it’s confusing. And in my collection, I’d end up having titles with ‘Remix’ lowercase and other(s) uppercase. No shades in my collection, that’s for Photoshop
Well, guess case is supposed to be there to generally make fixing titles quicker, not to be clicked without checking the results
There are definitely some cases where it does the wrong thing. Your example is one of them, anything involving “piano” at the end of the title is another (although IMO that one should just be removed because it’s more often wrong than right), “A” getting lowercased when it’s supposed to be “Part A” or something like that. But it’s usually easy to catch the small issues and fix them up before submitting.
I’m not “bashing” on the guess case, I actually find it quite useful. What I’m trying to say is that there WILL be cases where one finds the same word uppercase and in other cases lowercase. To an outsider this doesn’t show much consistency and leaves him wondering why?
Because we take pride in the data being added and curated by humans, and humans are prone to make mistakes (e.g., not double-checking Guess Case’s guessed casing).
I’m aware that discussion of this issue has long sailed off and is a closed matter, but lowercase, better, the ETI style is a mess! You all know that. And also not compatible with other “spell checkers”, for instance beaTunes .
What mess?
It is just the under brackets sentence style.
Because it is displayed between parenthesis and because, by definition, they are not part of the title.
Nothing overly messy.
I mean the mess in the MBz Db where you see many tracks that haven’t had guess-casing applied, e.g.:
Where you see:
The Spank (Kazooo - Spanken Remix1)
& other examples (MBz search right now is too slow)
Can we have some poll on this? I’ve been an editor here for 18 years, and everything makes sense, but this still bugs me. There’s no good reason. It seems to me like this is just extra work that makes the title look weird. No other database or shop does this. There’s no benefit to it.
There’s a couple of reasons, for the current method, I can think of:
Title case is for Titles. Extra information like ‘remix’ is not a title.
It’s consistent with how we do disambiguations, which these are similar to
It helps quickly identify when something is part of the title or ‘extra’
But on the other hand I don’t particularly like the idea of MB reinventing the wheel, when nobody else is doing something. And I’ve heard plenty of hate for this method… (people on the Discord haaate it haha)
But if this was changed there would be an obscene amount of recordings to fix If I had to speculate that would be the main reason this would be unlikely to change.
If I had to speculate that would be the main reason this would be unlikely to change.