I’m about finished and almost happy with my first opera addition, The Bartered Bride.
I would still like to fix the recording artists. They only need the composer information removed, leaving the performers that are listed on the CD cover. (No point in trying to figure out who exactly is singing on which track – they are all part of the performance!)
How should this be done?
[Edit:] I think I solved this, using @UltimateRiff ’s trick! Thanks! (Luckily my previous edit to remove the performers from the track artists is still wating for the vote to close, so I didn’t even need to re-enter the performers to the track artists just for the trick.)
welcome to the forums and the world of MusicBrainz classical~
(I started typing this first paragraph before looking at the release in question, but it’s still a useful trick)
one trick I used to use for this (before I became an auto editor, that is) is you simply put in an edit on the release changing the track artists, also tick the box on the recordings tab to copy those to the recording, put in all those edits, and cancel the tracklist edit. that leaves the recording edits to be voted on and applied
for this specific case (if the track and recording credits are correct), you can simply change the track artists on the tracklist tab and don’t change anything on the recordings tab. that’ll leave the recording artists alone while changing the track artists
one note, if you’ve got the release in hand (or good scans), usually opera releases will have a cast list per track, so it should be easy-ish to fill in the proper singers per track and update the recordings
Actually the track artists I already edited to only name the composer (there’s still time to cancel the edit, if I got this wrong!) – it’s the recordings’ artists I’d like to fix. I think your trick would work… but I’d need to temporarily change the track artists and then change them back again, and wait a week for both of those edits to be approved… [Edit:] Ah, there was more to this trick! I missed the cancelling part – that’s clever!
I don’t have the release or scans available anymore, but I also don’t think it had per-track credits. (Roles are mentioned in the track titles.) My intuition says credits should usually be per full opera. Maybe (like in this particular case), the Overture and acts could be credited separately, since especially the Overture could be performed on its own too. (I guess if the same recording of the Overture would appear alone on another release, it might be credited without the singers.)
Does this rule apply to opera in particular too? I might be wrong, but I think operas don’t usually do credits on a per-track level. You wouldn’t usually do per-movement credits for symphonies either? (Maybe you could for Beethoven’s 9th though.)
Operas usually give the ‘‘roles’’ per track, with a list of the performers and their respective roles separately. So you can easily match the performers to the tracks where they perform. None of the “Bartered Bride”-Releases we have is currently “state of the art”. But see this opera here with a correct, track per track listing of the performers (with their roles) as relationships (and as Recording artists) https://musicbrainz.org/release/5c17f09f-b43b-49a5-a5c9-91169ae49ba2
This can’t be right. It could make sense to add Act information on all the tracks here, and it could maybe make sense to also add the name of the opera to the recordings. But to me it does not make sense to repeat the name of the opera on all the tracks. The name is already in the release title, and track titles are always connected to a specific release, aren’t they?
I’m probably not going to add the act information to every track either, since the CD booklet didn’t group together the tracks belonging to the same act. (This is just my interpretation of the rules, so I’m not going to protest either if someone else wants to add act information to all the track names and not just the first track of every act as is the case now.)
Actually… maybe I’m wrong here. Track titles are connected to a medium, aren’t they? And that medium could appear on several releases that are named differently. In that case… I need to learn more!
I did some Work on this release, following our guidelines:
– Adding overall Titles to Tracks/Recordings
– Changing the Track Artist to composer
– Adding appropriate performer relationships to Recordings (with roles)
– Replacing the Recording artist with this handy script: GitHub - loujine/musicbrainz-scripts: Collection of greasemonkey scripts for MusicBrainz.
That was… efficient! I now suspect you work with metadata as a librarian somewhere…
I looked at the editing history and didn’t find anything to complain about.
One question: Should I cancel my 43 edits that are waiting to be voted on? Two of them are for fixing the track artists to composer only, and there’s probably no harm if that gets done a second time. The rest are for fixing the recording artists; I probably should cancel those, since your edit provides more detail. I guess there’s some safety mechanism though that prevents these edits getting applied?
Well guessed: 40 years at the Swiss Theatre Archive – and 16 years here on MusicBrainz
Your 43 edits, mostly wrong anyway because also including performers absent from the given track, will most certainly be rejected by ModBot with the comment “The tracklist has changed since this edit was entered, and conflicts with changes made in this edit” unless you cancel them…
