For Classical what order should performers be added to the Recording Artist field

From https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Classical/Recording/Artist there is no mention of an order, so do I assume they are to be added in the order they are displayed (ignoring composer)

Also from the examples its clear that performer can be individuals, orchestra, conductor but the word ‘performer’ does make it sound like its only an individual perhaps it could be made clearer that orchestras and conductor shod be added here if credited.

I think everyone is using the GreaseMonkey script to set the recording artist from the advanced relationships… so they go in the order the script puts them.

Recording artist comes from the details in the track book, not just the cover. And performers on the cover who didn’t contribute to that particular track shouldn’t be listed. So you can’t just use the cover order even if you were doing it by hand.

That seems like a good assumption. But the guideline should make that clear.

How about adding the wording, to the end of present section Multiple artists,

Within the composers, and within the performers, list names in the order they appear when reading the front cover.

Oooh, interesting! I didn’t know about this script.

You can find it at https://bitbucket.org/loujine/musicbrainz-scripts/wiki/documentation.rst#rst-header-id16 (if you haven’t already).

Thats rather an assumption and not borne out by the data in the database, maybe experienced MusicBrainz editors are using it, but more casual editors certainly are not, and it certainly cant be assumed by the CSG. I dont see an explicit ordering when you add advanced relationships so I wonder if the order is the order they are added or the order of the relationship type, i,e does conductor always come before orchestra, or only if you add conductor before orchestra.

But anyway in this discussion Why don’t Classical releases have track artists?
although there was no agreement about changing things I think there was some agreement that ‘track artists’ do exist for Classical just as they do for Pop/Rock its just that they are involve more people and there are some grey areas (but there are always grey areas). Clearly if added manually I wouldn’t add a performer to the track artist if they did not perform on that track but this is all clear from the release cover/liner notes. And the recording relationships do not provide a great alternative because:

  • they allow performers to be added who are not credit on the release cover/back (but did play) to be added
  • recording artist relationship artist credits are recording level not track level (as chirlu mentioned in another post)
  • no order defined

So whilst recording artist credits could often be the same as the recording relationships they are not necessarily so.

If we think about it from a tagger perspective using ID3v24 for a second just to make my reasoning clear

For a Pop/Rock album the track artist is clear and would go in the TPE1 field, there may be many additional performers credited on the release and added as advanced relationships , but we would not them added to the TPE1 field, they would go in the TMCL field.

For Classical, there are clearly some performers we would want added to the TPE1 field (the conductor would not, they would go in the TPE3 field), and there are other performers who we want in the TMCL but not merit going into the TPE1.
The logical split is the between those artists in both recordingartistcredit and recording advanced relationships and those that only go into the recording advanced relationships but this distinction will not occur if recordingartist is generated from the recording advanced relationships.

But that is in the Release Artist section not the Recording Artist section

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The script does have a consistent order (I think it’s soloists, orchestras, conductors) but other than that the guidelines don’t call for anything specific, so at least at the moment the recording artist credit shouldn’t be read as anything more than “here’s people who got credited for this” without any further depth to it.

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