Clarification on (German) ETI and Series Numbering

MusicBrainz
1

The guidance in the FAQ wasn’t clear enough for me, or I keep missing the essential sections.

Subjects ETI

  1. Song (Instrumental)
  2. Song (Acapella)
  3. Song (Remix)
  4. Song (Remaster)

Assuming these would all be the same song, it is my understanding that we would want to consider these 4 explicit variants as the same recording, if they truly originate from the same original work.

My impression is, that we really don’t want any of the ETI shown here to ultimately appear in the title at all.

  1. Should be illustrated through a “instrumental version of” relationship instead.
  2. Should be illustrated through a “a cappella version of” relationship instead.
  3. Should be illustrated through a “remix of” relationship instead.
  4. Should be illustrated through a “remaster of” relationship instead.

Making sure you're not a bot! suggests to me that all of these only differ in the post-processing of a single original recording. I can’t fully comprehend how cleaning up a recording would be less qualifying for a new distinct recording, than just muting the vocal track. In my mind, these are all equivalent manipulations, just with different impact.

Thus, I shouldn’t really have to think about proper capitalization of these terms, remove them, and establish the correlating relationship, right?

But if I don’t create a second recording, then what entity has the mentioned relationships to the original recording? It seems like I should build the relationship as “release” → “remaster of” → “release”, but this feels insufficient, as it requires uniform releases for the entire tracklist, not just the song in focus.

So, is this why we do keep the ETI and maintain multiple recordings?

Another example for illustration: Recording “Außerdem (instrumental)” by Curse - MusicBrainz It seems to me like the ETI should clearly be removed here. If anything, it should be moved to the disambiguation. There is already a relevant relationship, which could be adjusted.

With that out of the way, assuming ETI should be retained in any of the cases, what is the rule to follow in German?

  1. Is it “Das Instrumental” or “Die instrumentale Version”, allowing for both Instrumental and instrumental to be valid proposals.
  2. Beyond the common misspelling, “Es wurde a cappella gespielt” feels intuitive. When we get to the noun form, I lose grip. The German term is derived from Italian, and seems to be treated as a single term. While the original meaning is “without chapel”, we no longer care about the chapel having been a noun in Italian. This is illustrated by the capitalization of the term A-cappella-Chor. So the actual candidates seem to be A cappella or a cappella.
  3. “Remix” is not a German word in any shape or form. Instinctively, I would treat it with English language rules, and always write it in lower case.
  4. The same applies to “Remaster”.

Subjects Numbers

  1. Album 2
  2. Album II
  3. Album Zwei

Usually, I will just look for any piece of art associated with the work, and then write it exactly as I see it. However, I noticed that this results in inconsistencies in series, sometimes causing duplication.

Is there something to be done here?

2

There are several questions here and I am not sure I understand all of your post, but to start here:

Of those four, I would only consider the latter (remaster) to be the same recording. The other three cannot have the same audio content, barring labeling mistakes. Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying, but if you agree that these are distinct recordings, the relevant ETI should appear in the title.

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3

ETI

Three of those are unique Recordings. Only the Remaster is seen as the “same” as the original in MusicBainz eyes.

And in the case of the first three the ETI is likely to stay on the track list. Remaster is usually removed from ETI.

On the Recordings title, the ETI often is moved to the disambig. Not always. As a remix it is a very important part of the title. And with all of these examples I’d keep the ETI in the recording title except for the (remaster). They are very different recordings.

ETI is pretty important at telling Tracks apart.

The best way to look at it. If it SOUNDS different, then it is a different Recording. New mix, missing vocals, missing instruments - all make for different Recordings.

In MB eyes, a remaster is the same Recording as it is just the audio cleaned up.

All four of these will link to the same Work, but different Recordings.

Series
You can add series numbers to a series, but the albums should be named as you see on the cover. Even if they don’t alpha sort on the screen. This is why a series can be ordered

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4

Thank you both. I feel like this has already helped me on the right track.

Maybe it also helps to illustrate some of the patterns that I see, which throw me off track:

  1. A digital release of much earlier CD release, now including an additional medium with instrumental versions of all tracks on the CD. All tracks on the additional medium are suffixed with “instrumental”, and this also covers the intro of the album, which never had any vocals to begin with. This is not exclusive to mixed media release groups though. It’s also common with physical collector’s editions.

  2. A track labeled as “remaster” of a recording on a previous album, which is audibly de-noised, and re-leveled to raise the volume of vocals. Sometimes it sounds like the vocals were filtered out and lifted onto a re-exported instrumental track.

Given your feedback, I would now assume that neither of these labels on the medium are to be treated as factual relationships.

For case 1, this is a single recording that appears in the track list of multiple mediums under different titles. The recording has no ETI. The track list title includes the ETI.

For case 2, these are distinct recordings without a “remaster of” relationship. The label “remaster” is removed from recordings. On the track list title, it is retained as ETI.

5

I think this is basically right, but maybe some things should be clarified. (This represents my understanding of style – happy to be corrected if I made a mistake.)

  1. The instrumental tracks should be separate recordings if they had vocals to begin with. (Maybe this is what you already meant.) The instrumental recording should have ETI in its title if there is ETI on the majority of linked tracks (see style) – sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t. (For example, if the instrumental version of an album is issued separately, this is often without ETI at the track level.) In particular, the ETI in your example recording should be kept according to this guideline. If the recording does not inherit ETI from its tracks, it will probably need disambiguation to distinguish it from the non-instrumental version.
    Tracks which did not have vocals originally (but have instrumental ETI because they’re part of an instrumental version of an entire album) should use the same recording as the original version – they are often literally identical files.

  2. De-noising can be just mastering, which doesn’t lead to a new recording. It is also possible to apply mastering effects (e.g. EQ) that will result in changing the relative volume of vocals – personally I would take the release’s word for the fact that it is just a remaster, unless there is good evidence to contradict this, but opinions may vary. In that case there is only one recording. I would leave the remaster ETI on the track unless it’s repeated on every track on the release.

    As I understand it, the difference is that mixing involves converting the full multitrack recordings (possibly many hundreds of individual stems) into a file intended for playback (let’s assume stereo for simplicity), whereas mastering is an operation on that mixed-down stereo file. If you want to mute the vocals while changing nothing else, then you need to have access to the original multitracks, and so that’s a new mix. If you just want to denoise, change the volume, apply EQ etc, you at least have the option of doing that directly to the final stereo file without ever needing the multitracks, and if you do it that way then it’s just mastering.

    Of course, the hard / impossible part is to tell which is which just by listening. If something sounds very different I think the recordings are normally separated to be on the safe side, but there are cases even of 5.1 and stereo recordings being merged, because the artist / label made it public that the multitracks weren’t available, and so the 5.1 “mixes” were just generated algorithmically from the stereo mixes, which counts as mastering on MB.

    Since it is now increasingly plausible to use machine-learning tools to generate fake multitracks from a stereo master, and then mix them, there may need to be a clarification at some point about what that should mean on MB. This might cover older, more low tech solutions like isolating the phantom centre in stereo recordings (which is where the vocals often are, along with other things like kick drum) and cancelling it to create a fake instrumental mix.

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If it was an completely instrumental album, then (instrumental) is removed from ETI as it is implied in the title. Similar with (live)

If this is a second disk of an album, and the first has normal vocals, then all of the second disk will keep its (instrumental) ETI. This is pretty important as you have two sets of tracks. One with vocals, one without. So the ETI is part of that title.

Note that these instrumental recordings should have the ETI. OR at least it should be in the disambiguation.

MB doesn’t like the (remastered) word and will remove it. This is based on it being the same recording as before, from that same tape as before. Just “cleaned up”. If you played both tracks in something like Audacity you’d see the exact same shapes but differences in volume, clarity, etc. Otherwise it is the exact same recording.

In this case the word “remaster” will not even stay in the ETI. It is usually removed from the release completely.

Digital shops love tagging “remastered” onto a lot of releases to make you think you are getting something new.

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