Wanted to check opinions a particular kind of edit that I’ve been making for a while without no votes (as far as I remember!) until getting a couple of independent ones in two days – would be good to know if there’s a consensus.
You often see disambiguation comments for digital releases which refer to the bit depth and sample rate (e.g. 24bit/96KHz), to a particular digital store, or to service-specific mastering. None of these are now valid reasons for entering a separate release on MusicBrainz (Style / Release - MusicBrainz), although I think some of them may have been in the past.
I’ve been removing or replacing these comments, mainly because otherwise I think it can look like you are supposed to add new releases for these reasons. (But also because it is often hard to be sure that the comment is accurate for all online stores that could be correctly linked to the release.) A drawback which I acknowledge is that this might make it harder to spot that two similar-looking releases are in fact different, e.g. because of their track count or barcode.
So, do people want these comments or not? They could also be replaced by something else, that more directly explains the reason for distinguishing. I have been doing this if the difference is cover artwork, but not if it’s track count, barcode or label because those are already in the table of releases on the group page. (There is an older thread about this here.) Personally, I would still rather repeat one of those things than have something which doesn’t on its own distinguish the release.
Specific examples are here (comment has sample rate, releases distinguished by barcode) and here (comment has online store, releases distinguished by number of tracks).