Hi,
I know this issue was discussed already, but I’m not happy with the result.
This album was originally released on 2xVinyl and later on 1 CD. To make it fit on the medium, the appended applause was shortened. Part I is 15 sec shorter, but is still the same recording. Part IIb is more than a minute shorter has a separate recording. The difference is audible on both tracks, but I never noticed. In fact I stop listening the moment the music is over. The listening experience is different anyway as you have 3 interruptions if you listen to the concert using Vinyls.
I made the CD version of IIb an “edit of” the Vinyl version, but I’m not happy with it. Usually an edit has a different length of music, not applause. I don’t think it’s a separate recording.
(about a minute of applause remains on the IIb CD version and before that are 10s of silence as no one dares to applaud before he stands from his piano)
No. If the length is solely because of applause than it should be the same recording. I would, however, add a note in the annotation of the recording to why the different lengths.
Silence is easy. Clapping isn’t far from silence as it can be argued that it is not the artist’s intended performance (the music)
Haha - who is that nutter Ivan in there voting No.
This is such a confused area. I have seen so many different arguments on both sides. I’d vote Yes on the merge this time. I would suggest adding notes to an annotation to flag up why the different lengths.
But it needs to really get into the guidelines properly. Is it about the whole audio one hears, or is it about the music at the heart of the recording? How much needs to be chopped off to be an “edit”?
On a similar vein, I also would like to know people’s thoughts on an LP that gets cut up differently by different digital “releases”. I have an example where ONE LP exists with one studio recording, but it is in the database three times due to different bootleggers having ripped it to MP3 in different cuts. Giving different track lengths even though it is the same recording.
It is an LP with “bits between the music”. Sometimes these extras are on the end of one track, other times the extras are on the start of the next track. The album as a whole will be the same exact recording in each case.
Personally I think this is a case where they should be merged as these are the same recording. It should not be down to Musicbrainz to keep note of how bootleggers have chopped this up to upload as torrents. Even if the torrents are easier to get hold of than the CD.
Then the recordings should really not be merged.
One would prefer having the recording with the extras at the end, in their collection, so they are not the same.
In this example the puzzle is caused by bootleggers and not the artist. If you stitch the tracks together and play them as one complete album they are the exact same length, and same recording. It is only that different people making personal recordings have sliced their MP3s at different points.
In each “Release” here the album still adds up to the full 33mins and 30 seconds. Nothing is lost in these three, they have just been edited differently.
Assuming these pirate releases are/were widely available, in most cases I would say that is sufficient grounds to have separate recordings for the bootleg/pirate releases.
For the purposes of determining recordings I think the release status (e.g., bootleg versus official) should not be a factor.
The differing pirate rips of these LPs happens as there were no times written on the vinyl. And the album is recorded as one piece per side. The Torrents and odd websites have it cut up differently. They all come from that same original recording source.
Only when the CD appeared over a decade later could you say a “track length” gets defined. But that CD is expensive to buy now going for £50 on EBay. So the torrents and Russian website downloads are going to be the more common definition of “track length”.
There are two albums on that CD. The other album in MB only has a single entry for the LP. The different length cuts of the torrents have not been uploaded for that making the question irrelevant there.
All three of these releases are marked as Official LP versions in MB. The same identical LP
They are not actually “releases” in the way that MB defines a “release”. These are copies ripped by pirates and uploaded to share. Nothing official at all. Nothing new created.
I don’t see rips of Dark Side of the Moon being catalogued in MB. Another concept album where there can be different editing of the tracks depending on the mood of the bootlegger.
If these were re-issues on a CD, tape or similar format I can see they should be kept as something to preserve.
Otherwise what is to stop me from uploading a new rip of any album to a Torrent site and then add this as a new “Release”?
I don’t think we have any such standard for releases.
We track physical pirate copies of releases, see for example MIYA RECORDS, why not digital pirate copies of releases?
In most cases I suspect the answer is “because there is no difference worth tracking between the copy and the original, because the copy is just a rip of some CD so you can just use the information from the real CD release”. In many cases that probably applies to vinyl rips too because the track splits would not vary much. I would expect this to be a judgement call on the part of MB editors.
But in this case you are describing what appears to be an important difference in the MB context: specifically that the tracklist and MB recordings would be quite different.
It’s not only about pirates. Everyone who sets durations from Vinyls will have difficulties if start/end of a track is a bit unclear. If the overall content is the same, the recordings surely should be merged and releases too, if that’s the only difference.
@ernstlx understands the point. There are no “pirate releases” here @draconx. I know all about bootleg releases and understand that they would indeed be given separate releases in MB. I have added many myself. But in this cases these three “Releases” have no difference. There are no “bootlegs” of them, just different editors ripping the same tracks in a different way and uploading them to torrent sites. Each time someone has converted the vinyl to MP3 tracks they have picked a different way of slicing it up, but in the whole they have the same content.
If I was talking about a bootleg of a concert that has been recorded from a radio and uploaded, I would know this is different to an official CD release of that same concert. Even if it came from the same radio recording. That would certainly need two separate releases in MB.
As my question is causing a negative, I’ll leave the mess as it is.
I should have looked closer at the edit histories of those three releases. Gets even more vague and more reason for the merge.
All three were initially uploaded without track times: 2003, 2011 and 2011.
One of them got times added from a bot looking at Discogs in 2015 - but look at that same Discogs page today and there are no times.
Another had times added by me from my own ripped edition based on a dodgy Russian website download.
The third doesn’t have a note in history where the times came from, but does at least have a different editor work on it in 2020 who isn’t me.
All three have different numbers of tracks depending on how one reads the rear cover and its track list.
Then refer to the actual CD reissue and you get a fourth set of timings.
I’ve been doing lots of work on Chumawamba and it is just a bit frustrating to have a mess like this sitting there which doesn’t actually represent the reality of Releases. These are not “bootlegs”, they are just inconsistent data.
These are not “bootlegs”, they are just inconsistent data.