History of Tracks and Recordings

[Freso]

@mfmeulenbelt

I don’t really understand why it isn’t simply called recording id in all those tags by the way. Is that for historical reasons?

Yes. If I remember correctly (and I might very well not - and the documentation is sparse to non-existent on this!): In the olden days, Recordings used to be called Tracks, then they got renamed in NGS, and then at a later point, we realised that we actually did want unique Track-as-on-Release IDs as well, so we made a new Track pseudo-entity. MusicBrainz was around for ~11 years before NGS though, so there are a lot of legacy tags, so we couldn’t just repurpose them.

Please let me know if I get the history wrong (@CatQuest? @kuno?), as I may want to put this info on the Recording/Track wiki pages.

[CatQuest]

Nope, that’s right. Releases (nee “albums”) had “tracks”, they got renamed to “recordings” during NGS.
Shortly after, we decided to have the separate “track” entity too, slightly related to the mediums/tracklists which during a short tenure used to have separate entities as well, (which I suspect it might come back with alt. tracklists…)