Digital releases: Merging? / Long country list? / Just [Worldwide]?

For everyone: I realised my mockup is open to interpretation. Let me try again. This would be automatically done for a release set to [digital media], with [x] or more countries set.

Click to enlarge images.

Display in release group:

When clicked:

Release editor (no change):
image

Sidebar/other displays shouldn’t have any trouble I imagine:
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Feedback? @tigerman325 & @elomatreb you are good sounding boards, as I think you sit on opposite sides here. What would be the outstanding issues for you, with the above?

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What would be done? An additional [XW] release event would be created in the database? Not only displayed?

I guess this would be possible, although it would not help much for statistics. Release events could already be excluded in a query if more than x release events are found for the same item. Picard does that if you use the suggested script for multi-country releases. But Picard (the script) does it only for a single item.

I think I could live with this, as long as this is included in the data returned by API (to avoid the guessing game for each implementation) and we adopt some guidelines for the treatment of semi-independent country entries (like Curaçao) and countries where it couldn’t realistically be available (e.g. North Korea or Russia for the moment), and certain country entries are removed entirely (e.g. the aforementioned British Indian Ocean Territories) .

Ideally the editor UI should also get a redesign, because entering more than a couple of release events manually using the current style is incredibly annoying. A possible design might be entering a date, and then selecting countries for that date afterwards.

No, the release would only be worldwide as far as the db is concerned.

(By default anyway - this is open to discussion obviously, but I feel like those of us who want to keep the data don’t care about that part)

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So only to be displayed and counted for statistics.

(I like to understand, but to be honest, I don’t really care about release countries for digital releases)

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If neither this “practice” nor the release editor changes it will drive editors away:

(why is the formatting messed up when quoting?)

The performance aspect is still one of the main reasons why I rarely bother with anything that has more than x countries. It takes extra time and energy. (and if my current device wasn’t fan-less it would also cause extra noise)

Surely it can’t be the goal to have 6 duplicate releases just because the encoding is different (or presentation of the tracklist for that matter).

Which revealed another detrimental effect of the long country list “spam” in the user interface.

Scroll wheel version (actually touchpad):

Arrow keys version:

(no video uploads in the forum allowed? not even a meager 40.8 KB one?)

Also, I’ve noticed the release duplicates tab in the release editor doesn’t collapse countries either:

BTW, I still have a pretty small screen (1366 x 768) which makes all of this even more of a nuisance. Are there any stats for screen resolution of MB editors/visitors?

Last but not least, even if all of this was somehow solved I’d probably still not be in favor of the country list “spam” as long as the manual labor of data maintenance burden remains.

If you long for accurate data MB might want to consider ingesting DDEX feeds:

Here is an example of the data a RIN file can supply (previously introduced on IRC):

It’s not possible to add equipment which is why I suggested adding Equipboard to the “other databases” whitelist quite a while ago:

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My suggestion would fix the issue in your videos chaban, it would just be [worldwide].

But no, it wont fix every other related problem :roll_eyes:

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I suppose this is the kind of edit a majority would disagree with?
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/89208395

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Many titles set to Austria on Discogs appear to be set as such because that’s where Sony DADC is. I would speculate that this is the case here on Musicbrainz as well.

What examples would you have in mind? The country of manufacturing is, of course, not necessarily the release country, neither on Discogs, nor on MB.

Do you want one example? Here’s one: The Best Of / The Temple Records Legacy (2003, CD) - Discogs

There is a tendency to put manufacturing country as release country.

I just thought it was amusing to see Austria mentioned in the context of these atrocious lists of countries, which aren’t really release countries as such either.

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That is just bad data. Easy to correct by following guidelines. There are mistakes/confusions like that all over discogs and MB. But also easy to fix. MB lists it as UK ( https://musicbrainz.org/release/b3dfd699-997f-4f6e-978d-44d3d62cf33c )

The discussion here is more about a flood of excess data about a digital shop and where is is selling today drowning out Release data. Spotify choosing to deliver to limited countries world wide is like Amazon’s ability to ship a CD to anywhere on the planet. MB has an impossible task to find a way to handle this different type of data with a different meaning in the digital world.

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I would have seen no indication for any release country on Discogs. @IvanDobsky ← a Scottish label on the back is an indicator, of course (seen on back)

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The rear cover I just added? LOL. (Neeed to get back OT…) A Scottish band, on a Scottish label - then it clearly requires a list of 179 different countries. Plus Mars and the Moon. /sarcasm :rofl: I am JOKING with people. :rofl:

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Took me a while to see this post, but this should be fixed in 2022.05.03.1 :slight_smile:

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i don’t understand this argument. to me, this seems like a reason we would want to have a long list, because we can see exactly how many releases are available there, including worldwide ones.

another similar digital issue is releases that are now worldwide, but once excluded a few small countries. i’ve been adding these as “worldwide” with the new countries seperate, but i’d like to know what other people think.

releases like this, this and this.

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I might be getting a bit late to this but I really think @aerozol is right with their mockup.
I understand the concerns of losing data because, well, this is a database.
But we need a really user friendly UI and what we currently have is anything but user friendly.
It’s just a lot of info dumping at the same time and takes a lot of space in a screen, specially in smaller ones as pointed by @chaban

Having a [XW - a few countries] format is a pretty cool solution, even if it only works at a UI level and doesn’t impact on the db.

The downside to this will always be that it’s nearly impossible to maintain. We can’t always be aware of the whimsical changes big platforms make regarding streaming licenses…

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Just because we can enter 200 countries doesn’t mean we should. I still think it’s a Style issue barring schema changes.

Personally, I care about the country of origin / primary market of the release, as that is a way I classify my music into different groups. I’m constantly having to fix and ignore the junk Digital Media data in MusicBrainz.

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I’d love to see an optional Picard script that spots a list of “more than five” countries and then swaps the country to the Artist’s country.

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