Help please with checking a digital release

Hello,
I’ve just added a new release to a release group for a digital version of an album (this is because I wanted to create a collection of the music I have purchased this year)

Could I ask someone to check it please?

Some questions:
The date - the label’s website where I bought the files lists the date as 1999 (which is when the CD was release) I can’t imagine they were selling digital files back then. Is it OK to use the date of the CD release? Not sure how I would find out when they first made the digital version available!

The medium - 2 x digital media - ummm, not sure about this. BUT when I downloaded the files the tracklisting is disc 1, track 1-9 then disc 2, track 1-9. Should I change it to 18 x digital media? If so, how?

Thanks for any help!

If I have bungled this irrevocably or I shouldn’t have created a release for the digital, please let me know and I will delete it.

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No, you can’t use a CD date. Just leave it blank. Unless you luck out and find an old news article stating when the digital version was released you don’t really know, so can’t guess.

When tagging you could just copy the date from the CD in your own tags.

No need to change it. Often see this with Digital Media where the artist still sees it as two separate disks. Their own website also lists 1-9, 1-9.

Rest of release looks good and it makes me laugh that Track 6 is called Track 4 just to mess with a tagger’s OCD :rofl:.

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The new release looks pretty good to me!

I downloaded an MP3 sample from the Warp page in the hopes that it’d have more details, but it didn’t include an ID3 tag. I didn’t see any clues in other digital stores (Bleep, Apple), either. The Wayback Machine first archived the Bleep page in 2014, but that’s no guarantee that it didn’t exist earlier. I also tried checking the iTunes UPC database, but https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?upc=724384831226 (that’s the French CD release’s UPC) unsurprisingly lists the 1999 release date.

Unless someone else knows a trick for convincing any of these digital stores to cough up the date when the release was first made available, I think I’d just leave it blank in MB. It looks like the Discogs digital release doesn’t include a date either.

2x9 seems reasonable to me – that’s how both Warp and Bleep present the digital downloads.

Edit: The Medium documentation agrees:

Digital (as opposed to physical) releases don’t have “real” mediums, but they should be entered as several mediums if they are officially divided in several “discs”.

3 Likes

Excellent, thank you very much! I have removed the date.

Also you might be amused to know that on the EP on which it was originally released, Track 4 was track 2!

Thanks again!

4 Likes

Great, many thanks for the in-depth response! Interested to learn about the iTunes UPC database! Didn’t think to check Discogs - duh! I’ve got to say adding to Musicbrainz is much easier than Discogs…

Thanks again!

Ah - that explains why it is now Track 6 because 2 + 4 = 6. :joy:

Glad to help. And unlike Discogs there is normally someone friendly around to help out and not just quote random made up forum rules from five years ago. :grinning:

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