I just received the ‘Jerry Lee Lewis at Sun Records: The Collected Works’ box set and I came across some titles for which I’m unsure about the appropriate capitalization. The following titles are titles like these:
Religious discussion Studio chatter Studio chatter #1 & slate #1-channel B Studio chatter & slate #4 Studio chatter #1 & slate #8-track B Studio chatter #2 & slate #9-track B-tk2 Two unidentified snippets of unknown ‘lost’ track
In the tracklist of the box set they are written down like above, only with the first letter capitalized. But when applying the rules of MusicBrainz you should write them down like this:
Religious Ciscussion Studio Chatter Studio Chatter #1 & Slate #1-Channel B Studio Chatter & Slate #4 Studio Chatter #1 & Slate #8-Track B Studio Chatter #2 & Slate #9-Track B-Tk2 Two Unidentified Snippets of Unknown ‘Lost’ Track
Most of them like Religious Ciscussion and Studio Chatter look normal, but the tracks like Studio Chatter #2 & Slate #9-Track B-Tk2 look very strange with the ‘B-Tk2’.
I’ve also seen people on the internet write it like this:
Studio Chatter #2 & slate #9-track B-tk2
In summary, I’m very confused about these titles and I hope someone with a better understanding of this, and who’s native language is English, can help me out with this one. Thanks!
I think what you’ve got per the style guidelines looks correct case-wise, and no stranger or less intelligible to me than the original sentence-casing. If I’d make any change it would be to add spaces to more clearly separate each piece of information, like so (assuming I’m correctly parsing the info.):
Personally, I might even consider going a step further by incorporating the spirit of the “series numbering” style recommendations, replacing the (personally) less elegant hyphens-as-separators with (grammatically) more standard commas-of-increasing-specificity:
But I don’t think that’s officially sanctioned anywhere, and I might be a madman and a maverick for all you know, so you should probably ignore that last suggestion (wink, wink). Like I mentioned earlier, what you proposed per the current guidelines (and probably my first suggestion) should be perfectly acceptable per the current guidelines, so you can at least sleep well knowing that.
This is what I would enter. The other thing I aim for is consistency to go with the clarity. So if three other releases are done with a different layout I’d follow that.
This is how I would capitalize it. I wouldn’t go the extra step of changing hyphens to commas. The Series Numbering guideline says not to insert the comma if there is already punctuation – in this case, the hyphen.