I can’t imagine this hasn’t either been discussed here or been included in some styleguide, but I am not finding the answer anywhere. The only mention I found in regards to songs being the same on both sides of a release is this excerpt from the medium docs, but it explicitly says only when they are remixes:
Exceptions in the treatment of mediums can exist: DualDiscs are usually entered as two mediums if the tracklist is the same on both sides, but with different mixes.
What is the proper way to do this? Just learned earlier for this same release that on Discogs it’s done like this:
I assume you’re referring to the difference between track A06 and B06? Thanks for noticing that! I completely missed it, assuming that the original editor on Discogs had entered them properly I just added the b-side tracks and the side letters. They’d just entered it once and someone left a comment that both sides needed to be included, and I had the tape in front of me for adding it here. Back to Discogs to fix that first before finishing the release lol.
I don’t think it was about the typo The point is that if literally the same content is on both sides, you should try and make sure that both the A1 and B1 tracks link to the same recording, and same for all other pairs. That is a bit of a pain since recordings usually get added automatically when adding a release - you’d have to either add the recordings in advance (with a note like “to use on both sides of release X”) and then use them when adding the release itself, or merge them after the addition.
A cunning trick that should work next time… submit the Release as just side A. This should create your ten recordings. Then go back and edit the release to add side B. Now you can copy the recordings from Side A to Side B on the recordings page.
I expect you can do that all within the 24 hour window to save lots of time all round.
I wish I’d thought of that before I submitted this. That sounds wonderful. I’ve been busy and haven’t been able to do it yet but I’m about to in about an hour and it’s it’s going to be tedious. Oh well, lesson learned.
genuinely, you and aerosol are both geniuses with this stuff. I’ve watched you two just solve problem after problem around here. Hope one day I can contribute half as much to this place as y’all do. Thank you.
We are both a pair of experienced old hands who made ALL the mistakes in the early years. Just from those mistakes we learnt the tricks to save us time. And now we both like to share those tricks to help you speed up your submissions.
This place is an addiction. You’ll never escape with your sanity intact. But you will love your music even more. And you’ll learn far more about your music than you thought was possible.
Already there. I’ve learned stuff about musicians I know personally doing this stuff, and it’s rekindled a passion for music that I thought had died a long time ago.
I know it’s technically incorrect, and people are welcome to go through and fix releases I’ve added… but I often just add the tracks once, and then add a annotation saying “repeats both sides”.
Tapes that I’ve put out like this, the intent is never to have a ‘double tracklist’ - I just happen to have tapes the right length, and don’t want to waste the B-side! (To reiterate, not looking for an argument about whether or not this is technically correct, I know it’s not )
This feels like the most reasonable way to do it, honestly. Even if I was to digitize my tapes, which I probably will, I ain’t recording both sides. That’d be silly. The double track metadata will probably never get any use from anyone.
I wish I’d thought of that before I submitted this. That sounds wonderful. I’ve been busy and haven’t been able to do it yet but I’m about to in about an hour and it’s it’s going to be tedious. Oh well, lesson learned.