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.
I was in communication with them last year and have just written an email. Text is reproduced below:
Following our email correspondence last year [ …] I thought you would like to know that the MusicBrainz Community has decided to “clean up” all hyperion releases on MusicBrainz – in other words the end result should be a pretty complete database of all the label’s releases providing a very rich data set. See the process so far at Community Cleanup #4: Hyperion.
Hyperion is, so far, the only label to be selected for such special treatment and is partly because of your practice of making pdf booklets available so that the data is easily accessible (note that MusicBrainz will NOT copy the pdfs!). I hope that this is helpful to you. Speaking personally, one of the factors affecting my decisions on albums to buy is whether a good metadata set is available (assuming comparable recording/performance quality), so I hope the exercise benefits hyperion as well as the owners of your releases / other interested persons.
Of course, this does rather beg the question as to the entry of data for new releases after this clean-up exercise is over. As previously discussed, it would be nice if hyperion updated MusicBrainz for each new release (about 30 minutes work usually, once one has learned how to use the editor); then you would be able to claim that “all releases have a full metadata set on MusicBrainz” – do you have any further thoughts on this? (Meanwhile, I have just bought a bunch of releases and will be buying some of the new ones too, so will enter those in the database).
@loujin asked if I could share a release that I think has everything for being marked as high quality as an example, so: this is what I think we should try to get, pretty much.