Me too - but this is not one of them!
Unless I misunderstand what you are saying, this approach is only possible for adding and removing relationships, not changing the “credited as” field. There is only one Simon Rattle and the artist entity (rightly) describes him as “Sir Simon”. How he gets credited is far more complex. It seems to me that there are five places where a “credited as” can exist for an artist - all or any of which can be inconsistent or wrong. Chasing these down and changing them is a laborious and labyrinthine experience. These 5 places are:
- The track artist. For classical releases, this is usually just the composer.
- The recording relationships. This is what you add if you “batch add”, but you can’t “batch edit” them as far as I can see. Sure, I could delete all the Sir Simons and then re-add them with plain ol’ Simon as the “credited as”, but I’m not sure that fixes it, because of…
- The recording details. The only way I can find of accessing these is by clicking on each recording and going to the edit tab - see pic:
- The release.
- The release group.
I leave it to database experts to decide if all these are really necessary but, if they are, it would be really handy to be able to edit just the release and then say “apply this artist credit to all recordings and relationships for this release”.
The “recordings” tab on the release edit does have an option “Update the recording artist credit to match the track artist credit”, but of course for classical recordings, that will just be the composer.
The situation is made worse by the way in which artist name changes are handled. Say you enter a release when an artist is just “Fred Bloggs”. There would appear to be no need to add a “credited as” because there is no difference. Then later he gets knighted or changes his name. The artist entity gets changed, but it would seem in other places, unless there is a “credited as” entered, the name will get changed too. I’m not quite sure exactly what happens - there was a long discussion here: Honorific titles for classical artists? (Dame? Janet Baker) which left me slightly confused
Would it not be better if all artist entries, including relationships, were such that the “credited as” defaults to the artist name unless changed and is then fixed unless edited explicitly?
I guess I could have made all the individual changes in the time it has taken me to think about and write this…
