We almost got Dvořák fully cleaned, with only a page and a half of hard-to-fix recordings from compilations left. Which honestly is a great result (especially since most people won’t care that much about those compilations).
That said, I thought we could do something different this time, and hopefully avoid albums with no info available at all The best way of doing that is to focus on a label instead of a composer: ideally, a label that offers (almost) all of their booklets for free so that everything can be checked without needing to have a copy of the release. One of the best examples of this is hyperion (official site), a British label that puts out all sorts of interesting stuff from medieval music to contemporary classical. So this February we’ll clean up hyperion (Hyperion? the logo is lowercase, anyway!) releases
Tools
@loujin has made a nice dashboard that shows our current hyperion (and related label) releases, and the ones from their complete catalog list that we seem to be missing. It matches by barcode, so if we’re missing the barcode, the release will still appear on the “we’re missing this” list - make sure we really are missing it before adding a new one!
A hyperion website importer doesn’t exist yet has now been created by @loujin:
My Classical Editor’s Toolbox, especially if you’re a relatively new editor. You’ll definitely want to install most of the userscripts mentioned there.
Discogs pages for hyperion and helios. Usually, the label page will be better than these, but some old releases (especially vinyls) might be on Discogs and not in the official catalog.
How to use the Hyperion website
The website has a lot of info! Here’s an introduction, I’m sure I’m missing some stuff.
Choose the right label! In general, you can look at the catalog number: CDA = hyperion, CDH = helios (other sublabels and distributed labels are more obviously different).
For full booklets, click “Digital booklet (PDF)” under the cover art. It might not be always there but I can remember almost no cases where it wasn’t All the booklets include a request not to upload them elsewhere, so let’s respect that: please do not upload the full booklets to the Cover Art Archive. Keep in mind when something has been re-released on Helios, the Helios booklet will also be linked from the old Hyperion version. It’s generally safe to follow this booklet, but of course if you know something was printed differently on the old tracklist you should keep it like it actually was
For a big cover image, click on the cover and then right-click + open image in new tab. These are ok to add to the Cover Art Archive: please do upload them!
For the release date (up to the month) see the box on the top right side of the page.
Barcodes are often not available on the release page itself for some reason, but you can get them from @loujin’s list, from the full catalogue itself or by searching Amazon for the catalog number and looking at the back cover.
Hyperion often re-releases stuff on the budget sublabel Helios, or as part of collections. If you see “Superseded by CDH12345” (or whatever the catalog number) to the right of the cover under the title area, you’re in luck! You can fix two releases instead of one with just a bit more effort (if one of the two is missing, just fix the existing one, then create the missing one based on the now-fixed version). Remember, CDA = hyperion, CDH = helios.
Other hints
Remember you have the full liner notes. This is very helpful when trying to identify works! If in doubt, check what the liner notes say. If that still doesn’t help (say, you have one of Dowland’s “A Fancy” and no idea which one that is) just leave it unlinked, don’t guess the work.
The website will sometimes be more specific than the booklet about which performers perform on which works or work parts. If the booklet is not too clear, see if specific performers are printed under the track title on the website’s tracklist
Recording dates are usually more exact on the booklet than the right-side box. Even if you see “Recording details” there, check the booklet first Old booklets might have only recording dates but no locations - recent ones seem to include both pieces of info almost always.
When choosing release artists, I’d suggest following the cover, not the website (if the website says Johannes Brahms and the cover Brahms, use just “Brahms”).
The hyperion website entries can be linked either with “purchase for X” or “discography page” relationships. I’d suggest at least “discography page” (with the purchase ones on top if desired), but just linking it is already good - that’s the quickest route to booklets, after all!
What to work on
Take either @loujin’s dashboard or the actual label pages in MusicBrainz, look at releases and see what seems to need work. An easy start is releases that still have the performers on the title rather than the artist field You can also look at the data quality column: anything with “unset”, “low” or “normal” should be missing stuff (if not, go and change data quality to high!).
Add missing releases: at the bottom of @loujin’s dashboard you can see releases that haven’t matched to MB by barcode. Make a quick check by searching the catalog number on the dashboard (if it’s missing the barcode, it should still show on the top list!) but most of them are just missing and need to be added!
If you’ve added all the info from the booklet (including engineers, copyright info and whatnot) and added the covers please set the release data quality to high from the sidebar. That way, other people can see that and not check the data again If something is terribly entered and you don’t have time to fix it, feel free to set it to low quality to point the mess to others!
As always, if you have any doubts or questions or you just want to ask the community to help with something, you can post under this
it’s still work in progress (I’d like to add at least columns for “are there covers for this release?” and “are there performers/works relationships on the release recordings?”)
it was generated from this jupyter notebook, so if you have comments or can improve my SQL queries don’t hesitate
I should be able to run it regularly to see our improvements
As @reosarevok said, the low hanging fruit is probably releases existing in musicbrainz that don’t seem to be linked to hyperion properly, see the sections “Hyperion releases with no catalog number in MB” and “Releases in MusicBrainz not found in Hyperion catalogue by barcode”
How do we credit a “booklet editor” (on this release and I imagine others too)? Should we have a new relationship for this? (the current “editor” is for music editing AFAIK).
Sounds like we should (or have a corresponding attribute for ‘liner notes’, like we have for ‘translator’ – though ‘booklet editor’ may be more than just a copy editor).
So, for my first attempt, I select to edit some hyperion-link-less mb releases, hoping that it’s an easy thing to do first and that this will help others (and myself later on) but of course at my very first find a problem :D https://beta.musicbrainz.org/release/d9a9a334-aa0f-4007-8a9d-674eda037ca0 is the first on the list, which corresponds to https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDGIM009 … or so I thought. Turns out that this is a different version - neither catno nor barcode matches.
so the question is, what do?
I can of course create another release in the same RG, but what about this one? will it forever linger in the “no hyperion link” queue?
Not sure if it helps, but I just uploaded the back cover of that release, where it says ‘previously released as CDGIM 009’ and also ‘Gimell Records is part of the Philips Music Group’. What is the relationship between Gimell, Hyperion and Philips?
The booklet is also different from the one on that page.
By the way, where do you see the barcode on the Hyperion page?
Another credit that seems to appear multiple times, “Front Picture Research” (also, is it time to split the awful, terrible, no good at all “design/illustration”?)
I have the 454 909-2 release too, and a badass one: Byrd 450 /Tallis Scholars purchased sealed in store, yet with 3 different CatNos (on each CD and booklet), and differing in tracklist from the already present release which in turn seems to have minor errors. Not really eager, but will probably add as is with dire annotation.
The parenthesis tip works also by URL in the Hyperion full catalogue. If you click on an old CDA title/catno that has a listed CDH re-release, the link is mostly pointed to the CDH – but the CDA entry is available even when not linked. To get there, just copy the CDA catno and paste-substitute at URL end, and hit enter.
¤ The 1st entry (CDA66828 Gombert: Credo & other sacred music, “Release date: June 1996”) is bad because it has its CDA entry open, and is (as lots of others) erroneously stated “Originally issued on CDH55247” with later “Release date: November 2005”.
Edit: And how you do a partial quote here? Aha, got it.
This is really useful but it’s also important to notice that the provided booklet isn’t for this older release (similar situation with all older releases). Older booklets were often only in English (crediting liner note translators might not make sense). Graphic designer and illustrator could be different for later releases and sometimes different photographers might have been used (artist picture for example might have been updated).
As usual, caveat emptor, it seemed to work on the few releases I tried, but ping me if something looks wrong. I didn’t try to import barcode and release date since those do not appear on the release pages as far as I can see.
The best way of doing that is to focus on a label instead of a composer: ideally, a label that offers (almost) all of their booklets for free so that everything can be checked without needing to have a copy of the release. One of the best examples of this is hyperion (official site), a British label that puts out all sorts of interesting stuff from medieval music to contemporary classical. So this February we’ll clean up hyperion (Hyperion? the logo is lowercase, anyway!) releases 
(if one of the two is missing, just fix the existing one, then create the missing one based on the now-fixed version). Remember, CDA = hyperion, CDH = helios.
