I still try to add video releases from YouTube and one of the things I don’t understand surely, how should I add these recording names? There are so many ways how authors add titles to their videos, especially in covers. Just for example:
And I try to do this, but it doesn’t look as the best solution… Often this makes it difficult to find these recordings/releases, especially if they have common short names. I try to fix it by adding disambiguation, but it helps only if there are not many recordings/releases etc. In other case, I need to open new tab for full search process.
Then I started to add aliases with these full names and edit commentary “Full title/name”. And my question if it is possible to add some commentary to aliases? Because it is difficult to find my editor’s commentaries, especially in cases with many later revisions.
Also what about translations of titles on YouTube? Some of them are translated to other languages by artists, but sometimes YT add them automatically. And it can be preferable to mark them in this way. And often YT aliases impossible to see if you don’t use special language interface and settings. What about community aliases, when some song or artist has a special name, that is popular only in the community of this artist? Why is it possible to choose “Multiple languages” for primary release name and is not possible for its aliases?
I think aliases can be categorized in groups like:
original/full recording/release name/title — name/title without any changes
artist translation — translations that were added by artists or their representatives
automatic/machine translation — translations that were added automatically
fandom/community title/name — names/releases, that are used between fans/communtity of this artist
And I think it can be useful to add “Commentary” field for aliases, so it will be possible to add info about their using or how you can find them
I don’t get that from the guidelines tbh. The artists should be moved but it would be uncommon for us to remove something like ([artist] remix) or a “creative” song title that is artist intent.
as a YouTube editor, I also don’t really know of a good solution for this. in general I’ve cleaned up titles like this (for example, a-ha - Take On Me (Official Video) [Remastered in 4K] becomes Take On Me), but certainly there are disadvantages to this approach (and the guidelines might not back this up either)
for instance, when logging YouTube listens on ListenBrainz, cleaning titles would make it more difficult for automatic matching, especially since artists aren’t consistent with how videos are titled (artist first, song name first, whether to include artist name at all, etc.)
on the matter of translated titles tho, the solution is pretty easy. I would generally create a new official release with the translated titles. this is based on (I believe) how classical editors deal with multiple languages on a single release (a very common occurance over there). you’d also add a Translation relationship between the two releases, and could even set the release countries to the countries in which the language is displayed (if that information is available, of course)
Some cases of additional information that is not part of the title and also not intended to distinguish the track should be removed:
“Song (bonus track)”: just “Song”
“Song (new song)”: just “Song”
“Song (The Beatles cover)”: just “Song”, with the recording linked to the appropriate The Beatles work with the recording of relationship (and the “cover” attribute).
IMO, it is the good solution. I do the same for unifying titles in DB. I just think it can be useful to add something as tags/categories for aliases and maybe commentary field for them too (at least for artists’ aliases). As I have written above, something like
original title — title without any changes
fandom/community title/name — names/releases, that are used between fans/communtity of this artists
and so on. It can make possible to work with these categories automatically.
OK, I’ll think about it, but IMO it looks too overloaded, because adding of a new release that include only translated titles of other release and recordings looks in my eyes as a little DB pollution.
On YT the title language, that you see, depends on not only of your county, but on UI language you use and other language settings, so it’s a little bit problematic. It isn’t linked directly only to country. And it’s the right method, because anyone can watch and use any language in any part of our world. This is the main reason why I think it’s better to add these translations on the same release in aliases. And here I remember about alias categorization again:
artist translation — translations that were added by artists or their representatives
automatic/machine translation — translations that were added automatically
