Somewhere between 2% and 10% of all recording merges have variations of “compilations” as the sole explanation in the edit note.
I have asked multiple times why the editors think this justifies a merge, but never got a response. Apparently many people don’t think questions in edit note discussions have to be answered if the person asking didn’t vote “no”.
So now I’m asking here if anybody has an answer for me.
To me “compilations” as an edit note means you found two tracks of the same song on two releases that are as unrelated as they can be and you haven’t found anything else that relates the two recordings either, otherwise you’d have written it in the edit note.
I imagine in most cases that means “I’m merging appearances in compilations into an appearance in an album/single”, or something like that. In most cases, non-mixed compilations will have the same recording as the original album/single, and in most cases, two compilations will have the same recording, since it’s pretty rare someone re-records anything for a compilation.
That of course doesn’t help at all when the artist does have several recordings of the same piece outside compilations, since it could be any of those in the comp. In most cases I don’t merge only based on “this is a compilation”, unless I have at least an acoustID match, or know this comp is a sampler for the label the album is in, or something like that, but sometimes (especially for Estonian stuff I know hasn’t been re-recorded), I’ll just automatically merge compilation appearances with album ones.
Exactly.
Some editor also only says “Same recordings” to most of their merges (and no edit notes at all, whenever possible).
I told them many times that there could be single and album versions, that there could be live versions with same length, etc.
But still “Same recordings” on and on.
The hype here is the suggestion that Paula ever asked for 100% proof. That’s not true. If an editor is going to go off in a huff because they are asked for something or anything beyond “they are the same because I say so”, they need to take a deep breath and think a bit beyond their own ego.
Paradoxically, I made a tool that eases recording merges.
Because there was and there are many cases where I neededMBS-2425 / MBS-3136 to merge back to back two editions of same album, track by track. And without MASS MERGE it’s a NO GO.
So it’s not really the same case.
I was against so called blind merges, that are (or apparently are, in the lack of educated edit notes resulting from research or ear check) made without any context (unlike two editions of same album for which I wrote MASS MERGE).
I don’t necessarily understand your example but I think it’s important and the least we should do, remembering why and being able to explain when we are doing a destructive edit.
