Discussing Musicbiz: Classical Metadata Style Guide

You are really always arguing one way, and then proposing things in contradiction to your own arguments.

You claim MB is just trying to cram data into a structure for the “first rudimentary player software”, yet you propose to follow a guideline that attempts to cram all the data into the rudimentary structure provided by music store fronts.

You (still) claim that “the biggest sin with databases is to squeeze several different pieces of information into one field”, yet you propose to do this by putting the composer into the album title. Hint: Your claim is wrong, it always depends on the specific use case. As you somehow intuitively seem to acknowledge by your proposal.

Everything in here is thought from the original perspective of the first rudimentary player software

CDDB did that, it has a field for album and artist, and a list of track names. Because that’s what the “first rudimentary player software” supported. MBs structure provides much more, with detailed relationships. Even today it provides more than even sophisticated players support.

That’s wrong, and you should know that:

grafik

And that’s also why your claim that MB is sticking composer information into the wrong field is wrong. There is a dedicated composer field, so identifying who is the composer is easy. The point of having the composer also in the album artist (or in the album title instead, if we’d follow this discussion here) is not to have a place to store the composer. It is to properly provide credits and make releases identifiable by the top level data easily. And that’s not even something that “comes from pop music and the early days of player software”. This is basically a thing since music gets published. Both the ones who sell the music and the listeners want to know who’s music this is. The very vast majority of releases (including classical) quite prominently credits various people on any release. And this usually involves the most important ones. And who to credit for an entire release can not just automatically generated by all people somehow involved on each separate recording.

What exactly is that?

Now we are shifting topics again. But just one thing to remember: A more sophisticated database structure and a better user interface are two separate aspects.

I guess you’ll have far more fields then, e.g. you need to consider Should Track Titles Include Attributes (Ragas, Countries, etc.) + Carnatic/Hindustani style guidance . And not sure about Jazz, but the Jazzers might have something to say also how they want things formatted.

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