I have created alternate English track titles for the Japanese compilation, Music from Akumajou Dracula: Black. It’s a 13 disc compilation of music from throughout the Castlevania game series and the music is broken up by game in sections that are defined in the liner notes. But is not chronological order from disc to disc. And on top of that, there are a lot of versions of the same songs as they appear in different games, so it would be very confusing not to have this information about what section the music belongs to. There are more than a dozen different versions of the most popular songs in the series, like Vampire Killer and Bloody Tears, for instance. This is where things get tricky.
For my own use while translating the tracks, I used the Artist field to denote the section the track is from. Also, having the name of the game the music comes from displayed alongside the track name in a media player would be very helpful, which is why the Artist field was initially used.
However, I want to share this information with the database and I don’t think it’s properly following the style guidelines to use the Artist field this way. The information about what section the music belongs to is important, but I don’t see a tag that would neatly fit the purpose of declaring that section.
So how best should I handle including the sections in the tags? Is there a tag that most media players would let me display alongside the track name? What is proper from a database entry standpoint?
if each disc is from a different game, you could probably use the medium title field, especially if it’s clear in the liner notes and whatnot. there’s a similar example from an anime here.
if each disc has music from multiple games, there’s another thread with a similar issue (and a ticket to maybe solve the problem):
a possible solution would be to use something like the recording disambiguation (probably good to have this data there anyways). if you need that information in your tags, you could probably put together a Picard taggerscript to include the disambiguation in the track title too. that wouldn’t show up on the release page however, but that could also be put in the release annotation if needed?
Thank you kindly for your quick response. Unfortunately, there is more than one game represented on most discs, so your first suggestion would not be possible. Unless perhaps I list all the sections in that Medium Title field? This would make the Medium Title field extremely, long though. What I have done with my labeling of the sections from the liner notes is to first list the transliterated Japanese title followed by a literal translation of the Japanese title and then any Western localized titles. This is then followed by the name of the hardware the game was released on, in accordance with the format of the sections in the liner notes.
So, for example, the corresponding section for track 11-22, “Name Entry 2K2 (From the FC Release of “Demon Castle Dracula”),” would be “Castlevania: Byakuya no Kyousoukyoku/Castlevania: Concerto of the Midnight Sun/Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (Game Boy Advance).” This particular game also shares the disc with a section for another game, which is “Akumajou Dracula: Circle of the Moon/Demon Castle Dracula: Circle of the Moon/Castlevania: Circle of the Moon/Castlevania (Game Boy Advance)” under my naming scheme.
This would make the proposed Medium Title “Akumajou Dracula: Circle of the Moon/Demon Castle Dracula: Circle of the Moon/Castlevania: Circle of the Moon/Castlevania (Game Boy Advance) and Castlevania: Byakuya no Kyousoukyoku/Castlevania: Concerto of the Midnight Sun/Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (Game Boy Advance).” That’s 277 characters. It seems way too long to me.
However, because of the size of this compilation, the particular game the music actually comes from is very important in making sense of the track. By way of example, there are literally 23 tracks titled some variant of “Vampire Killer” in this collection. Without the game title in the tags to differentiate, it becomes very difficult to identify the actual track you’re looking for. Therefore, I would prefer to have a solution with some way of keeping the game title within the tags of the track itself. Medium Title is only present in the DB and does not correspond to any tags written to the file metadata on the user’s side in Picard, right?
Apologies, I’m fairly new to this and some of what you said is a little over my head at the moment. I’m not clear on how taggerscripts work at this point. And before I even get to the point of a script, I’m not sure on what tag would make the most sense.
What is best practice? Are we free to create custom tags of our own, like “section” for instance, or is that frowned upon? Would another default tag already in Picard be appropriate? What is the tag “work” meant to be used for? Would the “movement” tag be appropriate?
in that case, I’d recommend following the State Fair release from the above thread and doing something like “Castlevania: Byakuya no Kyousoukyoku: Name Entry 2K2”, or however it appears on the release.
how we handle translated/transliterated releases is (to my understanding) demonstrated on say, this Death Note soundtrack or this K-ON! soundtrack.
if it was officially released with translated/transliterated titles (like the Spotify release of the K-ON! soundtrack), then that gets added as an official release. if it hasn’t gotten an official transl(iter)ated release, then it gets added as a Pseudo-release (like this Death Note transliteration). either way, all the releases should be connected by a Translated/Transliterated tracklisting relationship (I usually transliterate the release title and artists too).
another part of transl(iter)ating would be Aliases. most (if not all) MusicBrainz entities can have any number of aliases, from recordings to releases to artists. I think it’s explained pretty well at the above link. (see also the Japanese style guidelines) I also added some aliases to Light’s Theme for demonstration.
taggerscripts are scripts you can run in our tagging software Picard that can change how your music is tagged (scripts) or how it’s sorted in your files (file naming script). a good place to start would be Writing a File Naming Script in the Picard documentation.
for example, you could put together a taggerscript that adds the artist to the track title: “Queen We Are the Champions”. I don’t know why you might want to do that, but with a taggerscript, you can.
take the Overworld Theme from Super Mario Bros. for example. many artists have covered this song, and there’s several versions of it at the top. there are also Soundtrack works, which contains all the musical parts of a movie, TV show, or video game. (there’s also a ton of classical work types which I don’t really understand )
I think of a work kind of like the sheet music for a song.
I also wanted to briefly explain what a disambiguation is. it basically helps to differentiate between entities with the same name. it shows up on MusicBrainz in gray parenthesis after the name.
This is unfortunate when you’re using an MP3 player, but we still shouldn’t add personal notes to track titles. The disambiguation field is perfect for that though, as @UltimateRiff has described
You don’t have to worry about this part too much, but check it out:
A lot of the existing recordings have already been linked to works
Which have been linked to soundtrack works
…pretty cool
In my music library, I use the SETSUBTITLE field for track section titles. There’s currently nowhere for this data to be stored in or retrieved from MusicBrainz in a machine-readable (automatic) way, which is why MBS-6680 has so many votes.
Recordings are shared across different releases, and the disambiguation is supposed to identify differences between recordings, so it’s not going to end up being the same as the track section title.
The best you can do is write the track ranges inside the release annotation. That happens to be the same thing VGMdb is currently doing in their release notes, as they do not have track section titles either. (Technically, they don’t even have disc titles - instead, they have medium catalog numbers.)
Following the kind guidance from all of you, I have created an entry in the DB. My reasoning is that having something good but imperfect to begin from (and to offer to others) is better than waiting for every last detail to be nailed down.
I plan to return to this later and cross reference the different recordings, add composers, etc., but if anybody happened to get the compilation over the holidays and couldn’t read the track titles (or didn’t want to spend the better part of a week entering and translating them like me), this should be of use.
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