I have been around MusicBrainz for a looong time. I should know the answer to this. But I don’t, and I haven’t found the answer after a bit of looking.
How can I edit or add a Medium Title to a Release’s Medium? And where is this documented?
I understand that each Medium of a Release can have a Title. You can see this in the tracklists of release/8287 Premonitions: The Charisma Recordings 1975–1983, where the 14 mediums have titles like ‘Taken From the Album “Voyage of the Acolyte” / Taken From The Album “Please Don’t Touch”’. You can also see it in the tracklist of release/68be Celtic Dance, which has just one Medium, in CD format, with a Medium title “Celtic Dance”.
But when I open other releases to edit, I don’t see any “Medium title” text edit field to the right of the Medium format menu. See, for instance, release/673c Calling All Dawns: A Song Cycle. When I press the Edit button on that Release, the Tracklist page offers no Medium Title text box.
I read through the documents page, How to Add a Release. I don’t see a mention of Medium Titles there. I searched for Medium Title in the documentation. I did not find any relevant hits.
So, how can I cause the Medium Title edit field to appear? And where is this documented? I will feel suitably embarrassed if the answer turns out to obvious. But right now, I sure don’t see it.
Medium titles appear only when a release has at least 2 mediums. The only reason Release “Celtic Dance” by Casadh An tSúgáin - MusicBrainz has a medium title (which should probably be removed) on a one-disc release is that it used to have two mediums at some point, looking at the edit history.
Interesting, the original release was imported from FreeDB in 2002. In 2025 this editor, all in the same session “before entering the edit”:
Added a cassette medium to the existing release which had no format at that time
Set the format to type “CD” and added a medium name to the original medium (which was allowed in this edit session because of now having the cassette medium)
Entered the edit
After entering the edit for that session the same editor went back and cancelled only the edit that add the cassette medium, but the edit for the format and medium name were a auto-edit.
Is this documented anywhere? If not, where is the right place for it to be documented? I am willing to propose a paragraph to explain Medium Titles there.
I don’t think that’s necessary in any case. If there’s only one medium, its title is the title of the release. Only with more than one medium is it possible that each has its own title, different from the release title.
I can’t find where I have already used that trick, but I did it sometimes.
I don’t remember if it was my case but, for example, the release title can be the magazine name and we omit the paper medium 1 but the medium 2 CD (the only remaining medium) should have the CD title.
To unlock the title we could also have included the paper medium 1 with empty tracklist.
I’ve never done that, but there are indeed cases where I could use it. LPs often have separate titles for each side. These could be written in the medium title: “Side A: {title A} / Side B: {title B}”
However, this is not mentioned in the guidelines and I usually put that in an annotation.
