I’ve recently been working on entering some Japanese albums into MB and have encountered an issue regarding the handling of tildes (〜) in titles. Such as “〜Special Edition〜” or “〜Remix Version〜.” However, I haven’t found a clear indication in the MusicBrainz style guidelines about whether these tildes should be kept as they are or converted to English parentheses, for example, “(Special Edition)” or “(Remix Version).”
My questions are:
Is there a clear guideline? Are there any specific rules in the MusicBrainz style guidelines, particularly for Japanese works, that address how to handle tildes in titles?
What is the community practice? If the guidelines don’t specify, what is the usual practice in the community? Are there any unwritten conventions or preferences?
What is the best practice? Based on maintaining the original artistic intent and consistency in style, what is the recommended best practice?
I believe that keeping the original tildes might better reflect the artist’s intention, especially when the tilde is used as a design element. However, using English parentheses might make the titles clearer and more consistent, especially when compared to works in other languages.
Leave your opinions, suggestions, and any relevant experiences.
My understanding is also that these tracklists should be entered as-is. I interpret the Japanese guidelines as additionally applying to punctuation choices, since it’d be odd if capitalization were preserved for aesthetic reasons but punctuation weren’t. (I do usually update Japanese artists’ English titles to use Unicode single/double-quotes and apostrophes instead of the ASCII equivalents, though.)
Regarding pseudo-releases, I usually do the same as you and update them to follow the appropriate language guidelines and the ETI guidelines.
Hello everyone,