Digital releases

MusicBrainz
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Haha - and looking in that thread someone had said thank you before, then forgot to add it to Picard. Now in place and my Digital releases will stop being set to Afghanistan or whatever came first in the dictionary.

@ulugabi - the “hiding things from the eyes” script is just a case of tidying up the GUI. The Releases page iswas unusable with 100+ countries running down the page. Something that was fixed by MB devs ages ago it seems. :smiley:

As to your request about release quality - that will be a long wait. There has been a similar request in to allow us to mark the number of channels on a recording (mono\stereo\quad\5.1\etc) which is lost deep in the Ticket blackhole. There are also a few other long threads about digital quality and how MB is not really interested in those details.

Quick fix scripts like this List Collapser is great to keep the GUI useable for those of us who don’t care where Spotify are trading.

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Err… no idea… I’ll go check. Back shortly

Thanks to @ulugabi putting that link below I can check and you are right, that script is not needed as the GUI compresses the lists. I now see your link is more dramticaly totally hiding all digital releases. I assume that means you only have vinyl now as CD also digital? :rofl: Or maybe rename it to Hide Digital Media Releases ?

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Looking at something else I end up with a nice example for that thread:

  1. More than 100 countries credited for an audiobook rode in French with french cover (despite the label edits in French + english covers for other releases)
  2. Label differs between stores (Spotify & Deezer)

I let you vote on the edits if you dont agree.

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Not necessary hiding (I have some digital releases :slight_smile: but a more user friendly way to display all release types.
ex:

  • As a user you may look for Vinyl release and dont want to see all those CD/Digital ones
  • Or you may want to look if your Digital release exists and without sorting format it can be hard to find it in middle of all the other ones :slight_smile:

edit: @IvanDobsky
You meant having an option to select format on the recording itself like “Video” tickbox?
On my side I was thinking only to update the Format drop down list in Track list (where you have for instance if its a SACD 2 channels or multichannel) with something like “Lossy”, “CD”, “HD” to limit the options.

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That would be easily fixed by just letting us click the column headers on the list and make the list sortable. Personally I’d rather see everything on a page in all mediums. I was editing something yesterday that had been released on a Quadrophonic 8-Track tape.

Or I just use repeated < CTRL >+< F > finds down a page

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Bad original edit. It returned a “This is all of them, as of 2020-10-18”, should have been set to worldwide. Not sure why some are changing from Worldwide when it says there are no exempted countries. WIll fix it for you.

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Would be cool if there was a script that would sort by or hide media types. Never thought about that.

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I would (stupdily) say allowing sorting for all tables in GUI and/or add the filter option (as in recordings) would solve this case and many other ones by the same time…
…but I suppose it has already been suggested and there reasons why it s not done :slight_smile:

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This is what I thought you meant. And it is an old and long dead debate. MB is not interested in quality. There is a VERY long thread on this a couple of years back where the debate got deep. MB said “no”. You’d need more than “lossy” and “HD”. There will be newer “HD” to come. (Better to find that thread than take this one OT)

As to SACD and multichannel - even that isn’t really enough for what I’d need in Pink Floyd. I have tracks with many different channel layouts. This also overlaps into your digital files and quality as it is easier to encode a mono, stereo, quadrophonic or 5.1 FLAC file than it is to make quad vinyl.

I don’t buy digital, but do agree with you. Especially as now Spotify and co and starting to realise that better quality is needed. (But then I am a weirdo who can tell FLAC and MP3 apart)

For now, we have disambiguration fields.

Maybe check the Tickets black hole. I believe there is some kinda “rebuilding the website” reason to the delay on that one.

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It is even one of the oldest ticket, I guess it depends on the ongoing React conversion which is slowly coming to an end (as it seems).

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There are so many bad jokes in there about “slow to React” that probably are not needed. :rofl:

Living in the MB world one learns to have patience.

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Sorry I have been unclear, my reference to quality was only in the question of what can define a Digital release. For instance we can have a new barcode for files with different Bit depth and/or Sample Rate. Based on the discussions upper there is no debate about creating a new release but:

  1. Why not keeping the reason of this new barcode?
  2. What happen in case there is no difference in releases except the file format, that s where there is no clear definition: in physical medias a difference creates a different release but what happen for digital. Different download links/files on same store create a different release or not?

On my side:

  1. Compare to SACDs and Vinyls we dont show the cause for the different release despite they are (in most cases) just different medias with same recordings.
  2. In order to be persistent I tend to think that it should be only one release showing the max quality available as other files, lossy today maybe CD tommorrow, would be considered as transcode from main release.

PS:
In the never ending debates where science is put on the side there is even better, The HiFi cables: Ripley’s Believe It or Not! :slight_smile:

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No, you have been clear. I’m like you, I like details and would be keen on multiple categories. Just a topic for a different thread. There used to be admins who would split threads like this off and shout “OT”. :wink: Ah - I just noticed. This IS one of those epic long threads, so we are on topic.

Nah, that is very different media. Vinyl really won’t fit into my CD player. I’ve tried. It doesn’t fold too well.

Whereas multiple digital formats do fit into the same decent media player. (i.e. not an Apple one)(immeditaly starts another OT argument upsetting the Apple religion… haha)

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LOL! You are exactly right though. Apple media players are awful in that you are so restricted on what you can do. I think most everything Apple is poor for that same reason. I think they just got lucky and came up with one of the best lossy audio encoders. Opus seems quite good too, but the resulting sound is slightly different.

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There file format thing should not be a reason to keep separate. Many releases have multiple formats on the same release, especially hi-def releases which can be purchased at different bit rates. If they have the same barcode, artwork, number of mediums, label relationships, etc. they are the same release, IMO. This is because the mastered release is the same given from the label. A hi-def release sometimes will share the same barcode as a Spotify release. It’s the same release, it’s just that Spotify has limitations, not the release itself. Also, Apple uses different file formats than say Spotify & Deezer and we don’t separate based on that.

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This is not always true though. There are times that the master is done to match its intended use. Please do not mistake my comment as a disagreement, just a statement.

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I don’t think releases that are really the same in every way except for storefront should be split out (particularly because they are usually all added using the same distribution page, where you fill out the details, and then hit ‘publish’ to all stores).

But there are heaps of cases where there’s a different label, a different release date, or other edge cases that I want to be able to store. A ‘hide digital releases’ button to get everyone off my back about it would be heavenly (do I try merge all your complicated confusing data that I don’t care about? no, because I can respect that you have different interests grumble grumble) - but I figure it’s best to wait for the upcoming redesign before requesting heaps of changes.

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ack, sorry to bump this thread, i hate doing that, but… i’m trying to become the best editor i can be so i’ve been reading through the forums to get the general consensus on things. i’ve probably read every post on the discourse forums lol. i notice opinions are very divided about this so i wanted to share my two cents.

i agree a lot with @aerozol about this topic. id like to give my specific point of view as someone who almost exclusively edits digital media:

i do not care about the barcodes on CDs. as far as i’m concerned it’s useless information. when buying a CD at target or goodwill or half price books or whatever, i am not going to scroll through to see what barcode number the one in my hand has. i don’t care. it makes no difference to me. BUT! i recognize that as someone who does not edit CDs often, does not rip CDs ever (don’t even have a disc drive), and has no stake in any of it, i can just ignore them and trust that the people who made the “new barcode = new release” policy know what’s best in their preferred medium and what’s best for the community.

i don’t understand the reluctance to do this with digital media.

if an artist i follow very closely releases an album on soundcloud, on bandcamp, through distrokid, and on a CD, that’s four releases to me. in my eyes they are all inherently different. i would never dream of merging a bandcamp album to its streaming equivalent and it’s genuinely pretty surprising to me that this is not universal. to me “this is a flac straight from the artist’s hard drive”, “this is something casually uploaded by the artist last minute”, and “this is widely distributed to every major streaming services” are more than enough of a difference between releases even without any other distinctions. it’s like the difference between an artist distributing their CDs through a manufacturing company, and the same artist making identical-looking CDs by burning mp3s from their laptop. if you don’t want to add all of these, don’t, that’s fine, but i will for my releases.

i feel like, also, a lot of people are saying things about “a different digital release for every storefront is like a different CD release for every store”. but pretty much no one wants a different release for spotify, deezer, itunes, tidal, napster, etc. … we store releases from different physical stores when there is a difference (“Target Exclusive”) and we should be perfectly allowed to store releases from different digital stores when there is a difference. i’ve seen releases merged for this reason that absolutely had subtle differences (the title being in all lowercase vs Proper Title Case, for example). if two CDs were identical except the back cover had different capitalization, or the features were credited differently in the booklet, i would not expect anyone would merge them.

and, to be honest, if i follow an artist closely enough to add 23 different digital releases to represent Every Streaming Service And Digital Store for one album because i found that many tiny minuscule differences between all those platforms, then i definitely follow the artist enough to maintain those releases, and no one will have to worry about it. if they really are identical to you, pick a random one to tag with and close your eyes for the rest. and if i ever drop of the face of the earth and don’t maintain them anymore, then merge away, i won’t be there to stop you.

i don’t know, i just couldn’t pass this thread again (did i mention i’m crazy and have read every post on this forum, lol) without giving my two cents. it feels like a lot of people do not see digital releases on the same level of importance as physical releases and i think that is a very dated point of view. i care a lot about having very organized and well-documented data.

(for the record this isnt a commentary on how the database can be improved on how to better handle digital releases etc. i think a lot of the ideas here and in other threads are very good. im just speaking on how people seem to handle it right now, with the current database structure)

sorry for the bump and sorry for the novel, have a great week everyone

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