At a certain point I don’t care either way, this just needs to be resolved.
I won’t go out of my way to enter the (in my opinion) misleadingly precise hundreds of release countries, and I don’t want this tagged into my files either.
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That is exactly what I’m trying to resolve, and I thought I had.
If my mockup doesn’t solve your problem let me know how exactly and I’ll brainstorm some more.
Edit: realized it probably wasn’t clear, my suggestion doesn’t just set worldwide visually, everything in the db would see it as ‘true’ worldwide, including Picard.
The country drop down is the ‘mainly visual’ part, that could optionally be used by Picard/whatever.
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With the collapsible list I’m not even sure why people have a problem with it. A worldwide release should only be marked worldwide if it exempts IO on a-tisket, maybe Curacao, but if it’s in all countries, but US or China, etc. than that is NOT a worldwide release, IMO. I don’t care if it’s in 248 of 249. If that country is significantly populated than to me it’s not Worldwide. I check Jaxsta and see what the actual distribution list say though because just because it’s not in the major 3 doesn’t mean it’s not there. This mainly happens with small island nations. Digital releases typically just follow where the labels have contracts. But I fear that many will continue to mark any release that has more than 1 country and it’s digital as Worldwide, and that’s just wrong. Pink Floyd for example has 2 major distributors throughout the world, Sony Entertainment & Warner Music Group. However, I see people add a release in the UK and mark it Worldwide, when Warner only has the rights in Europe and not the rest of the world, etc. I see absolutely nothing wrong with the Lorde release group, because it’s correct data. To change it, would be a destructive edit in my opinion. And you can see that the releases, say with only 11 countries is for the censored cover art in mostly Muslim countries, etc. I find this type of info fascinating and if someone would have marked that worldwide when it’s only in Muslim countries would be much worse than it currently is.
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ah, so it’s in the database as [worldwide], but there’s a new field which specifically lists the countries it’s available? ooh, or doesn’t even need to be a new field, and if there’s a [worldwide] release event (maybe automatically added), it collapses the countries list on the release page and the edit page?
I do like the idea, but I also don’t see much issue with setting [worldwide] on releases with more than ¾ of the world.
also, the way I see it, a digital release is by definition an internet release. even if it’s files on a flash drive or Data CD or whatever, we’ve got those as medium types.
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On the list that only exempt those small island countries, most of them actually are on the distribution list provided by Sony Music, but for some reason they just aren’t on iTunes, Spotify or Deezer there (in other words, a-tisket). Sony says they are there, almost always when you look them up on Jaxsta, so they probably are available there in some other service or format. The other major distributors show up there almost always already on a-tisket.
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I still would compromise on my edits if that was an option. If there was a [Worldwide, except US], for example. That’d be cool but without a less or minus or whatever, I wouldn’t want a Worldwide if say US, UK, Canada, China, etc didn’t have it.
I’m trying to find a way to retain the correct data, while also addressing:
- that some people don’t like how it looks
- that some people don’t want all the countries in their tags
- that it breaks stats
I was hoping that my suggestion would allow that, plus you can still retain all the country information we currently have (as in the Lorde example).
What do you suggest?
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Unfortunately, there are many, many editors who want hi-res separate from standard res digital releases. I tried to combine some in Japan for example and felt the wrath come my way just because one was 96 vs. 192, etc.
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It’s better than it used to look before they collapsed the lists. When I use Picard to tag, it only shows “US” on all my tags even when there are over 200 countries on the list. I think it defaults to the country that you have set as preferred if it’s on the list already. And as far as stats, I’ve personally never paid attention to that, so that one I really don’t know. I’d like to list all the countries, but maybe only just put a blank country with a date and then list the countries without dates (because we don’t really know when it became available in each country most of the time unless we are lucky enough to add them right when they come out) or have the Worldwide except option. Worldwide minus US or even better add all the regions (continents) and we can say, for example, the Pink Floyd releases mentioned earlier, Europe for the Warner releases, or Worldwide except Europe for all the Sony releases.
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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):
Sidebar/other displays shouldn’t have any trouble I imagine:
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 
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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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