Only if the record company chooses to assign different identifiers (catalog number and barcode) to it, or if it can be researched that the releases have different engineers.
That’s just not true. Even if the barcode and cat# are identical, we have been separating them out. I know you’ve seen edits in the past on releases I’ve commented on where the only difference is 16-bit vs. 24-bit and I wanted to merge them and was voted down. Having attributes on the links would eliminate the need to keep them separate. It’s very common now to have hi-res releases with the same barcodes as cd quality releases. It used not be this way, but it is now.
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That’s not my experience, but even if this were the case, what makes you think that adding the text “16-bit” or “24-bit” to the download link relationship would change the validity of merging those products into the same MusicBrainz Release?
Because they are the same?! I’m confused by your questioning.
Examples:
I think these are all the same release. If we had the ability to add attibutes to the link we could have them all as the same and just on the the individual store links we could say what they are. Instead of having to create 3 releases, we’d have 1 and easily identify which store link is for what.
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I think it’s a good suggestion and it may allow us to merge them, but I also wouldn’t assume that everyone would be happy to merge them once we can define which relationship is for what bitrate.
There may be other reasons why people want them seperated out (I don’t know)
I think that is @yindesu’s point?
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Yeah, I get that. I know further discussion would probably be warranted. I’m just trying to think of a solution for instances like this.
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I think enough evidence has been shown to not keep these separate. Apple Music has both, but they use the same release to represent both 16bit & 24bit releases. E-Onkyo the same; shows all different bitrates as same release. MQA (Tidal) releases have same barcode as many hi-res releases & standard hi-res releases and E-Onkyo even shows both as the same release. It’s sometimes impossible to know when MQA is only on Tidal what the bitrate is. If bitrate is irrelevant, then this doesn’t matter. Many times, it’s just marketing, as demonstrated above. Recent Pink Floyd bootlegs that are Tidal MQA releases were obviously not 24bit. I’ve found some Pink Floyd HDTracks releases on archive.org that originally even openly stated that some tracks were 44k.1Hz/16bit blown up to 96kHz/24bit. Most editors don’t separate as it is. I was only doing it to help those that wanted separate to make sure they were correct. If there are zero differences other than codec or bitrate than I think they should be the same. Obviously, different barcodes, labels, cover art, mediums (some have 1 medium, some have 2 sometimes), track listings, I’d keep separate. We can add dates on the links to show when that hi-res link started. I’ll just mention in the annotation on each release, which outlets have what bitrate, etc. Hopefully one day we might get attributes on links, but the annotation is there for things that we currently don’t have.
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I’ve started edits on Pink Floyd doing this. Some have already gone through, but just posting this to draw attention as I plan on doing this on all edits like this.
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/92235996 is an example.
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