Ah, that’s the reasoning I was missing. Thanks! We do still need to bring the art over from Discogs (or provide our own scans) so we actually have a reference for the spine the entire viable argument is based on.
And a bit off topic, I’m definitely with @mmirG on the importance of being able to match cover to data even if you don’t know abbreviations or even the language, but how does that interact with our capitalization guidelines? If I try to edit something in Greek or Cyrillic, I’m not going to know which symbols are forms of which other ones. At that point, is it just "pull up the Wikipedia page on the alphabet, and check each letter as you come to it? On the other hand, I’m definitely not going to argue for anything that will result in all-caps names showing up in my library.
My argument around “front CA is the most widespread image associated with a release” is not based on ease of tagging illegal (or legal) digital copies.
Instead it is that more people will be seeing the front CA than the spine.
And that they will see “JLo” or whatever.
Insisting that something they don’t see is the “official” artist credit does create a barrier to ease of use of MB.
Now maybe the benefits of using the spine outweigh the effects of that barrier.
How and why?
Who is this user who is looking for a CD entry in the database, has seen the cover art, but doesn’t have access to a spine?
Either they are looking for a CD they have, in which case they should have access to the spine.
Or they are tagging a legal download, in which case they should be looking for the digital release in MB, where we should use the cover art, or whatever the download service called it.
The other one is about the inconcistency of cover art.
Often a cover is completely blank - perhaps we should put our data in as [unknown] by [unknown] in that case?
Or should we use a consistent source of correct data that lets us tag our music accurately?
If we are going to base all of our data around people searching using a cover image perhaps we should integrate a google ‘search by image’ search or similar instead, which would be more accurate anyway. However my assumption is that those searches aren’t that many, compared to, for instance, Picard tag lookups.
edit: Sorry I missed your other post - but honestly I don’t think I need to give any more reasons
A person who has seen the most common image associated with the release, noted a “JLo” and has decided to use MB to find out more about the music. Maybe a similar situation to that with 张楚 above.
It could be that an alias will be sufficient.
Another possibility is that a field “artist as named on front CA” field would work.
The nice thing about this option is that AI will possibly be able to fill that field in about 15 years time.
All we’d need is to have the CA.
For the first, there’s always the people whose jewel cases broke or got soaked, leaving them with just the CD, or those who (for some reason) decided to consolidate their collection by deliberately getting rid of the bulkier parts. Not a significant demographic, but it does exist!
And like I said on the edit, I don’t like the comparison to blank covers. Here we have data that seems perfectly valid (ignoring debates over standardization) that, only on a closer look, is inconsistent and perhaps less desirable. There, we know people have some way of referring to the album, and it may indeed have an official name, but the art doesn’t provide any help in figuring it out.
I’m thonking that staying with the spine is the way to go.
The best data readily availanle for releases seems to have been:
Cylingers: the box
78s : the medium label
33s: the back sleeve
CDs: the spine
digital releases: official webpages.
Changing approach now would create so much work, confusion and degraded data that the benefits of change would be swamped.
Though I think “ease of use” of the encyclopedia would be improved by having searchable “artist as named on front CA” metadata. (As suggested in another post, I think CA will eventually give us this"for free".)
(Spellng errors and wrong words courtesy og Google Android Gboard.)
The edit history of the release group suggests some division in opinion as to what should be done. Two years ago user BrownD changed the artist credit to the stylized version, and then very recently proposed changing it back (ultimately cancelling the edits once a negative vote was made).
I would suggest that the stylized title “Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D” is very intentional and is worth keeping, but the artist credit (“И1И31ИCHИ41L5”) is simply done to match the style of the title, even though it appears that way on the spine.
I’m not actively campaigning to change it back, but I’m curious as to what others think.
Visually it throws me off, but by removing it, would we lose some metadata not found elsewhere?
И1И31ИCHИ41L5 is not much of a problem, since searching for “Nine Inch Nails” will find the Artist, and the artist page properly lists Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D by И1И31ИCHИ41L5.
However, searching for Year Zero Remixed does not find the release. This may be a bug, because an alias has been defined. Searching for Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D works fine, but I don’t expect people instinctively searching for that (and getting it right).
This may be a bug, because an alias has been defined. Searching for Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D works fine, but I don’t expect people instinctively searching for that (and getting it right).