K-Pop Titles: English, Korean, or Both?

MusicBrainz Picard
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(I’m unsure if I should use this topic or General chatter category, let me know if it should be moved.)

I’m new to using MusicBrainz Picard, and as I’m now officially starting to organize my music collection, I’m having to face a problem that I’ve ignored in the past.

For clarification: I don’t plan on editing the entries on MB. I’m primarily talking about my own categorization. Sometimes MB doesn’t always categorize things to my liking, especially with K-Pop releases being not quite as documented and there being a variety of personal preferences on how to stylize things. I digress.

For K-Pop track titles, what would you say is the normal naming convention?

As far as artists go, I have been keeping them in English just to be easier for myself to search, since I still use iTunes as my main music player and management for my iPod Touch. In the Grouping tag, I’ve been putting the artists in Korean along with other stylizations (Ex: 9muses, NINEMUSES, 9 muses). I will likely do this for Albums as well (often, Album Titles tend to be in English so it’s less of a problem).

But I am having trouble with Titles.

Often, there are titles that will only be in Korean in downloads, Wikipedia, MB, Music Videos, etc. There’s a translation available usually. Sometimes it’s in the title (in parenthesis, or just next to the Korean title). Or, sometimes they’ll have both or the title will be different in Korean than it’s English title.

Ex:

  • 4Minute’s 미쳐(Crazy)
  • or the reverse,
  • Psy’s GANGNAM STYLE(강남스타일)
  • f(x)'s RumPumPumPum’s Korean title translates to “First Wisdom Tooth” so that’s basically two titles.
  • Exo’s 엑소 ‘Monster’

I was considering putting the English title in the Comment tag, but I don’t think that is searchable when using an iPod Touch’s music search (it is possible in iTunes). I like things to keep pretty true to the original, so I’d like to keep track of the Korean title in some way.

Does anyone have a way they suggest to keep some of that information? I don’t want to use Subtitle, and I don’t believe Title Sort works in iTunes, but is there another tag I can try or a script to make a custom tag for an alternative title/translation? Any guidance would be appreciated!

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I have similar issue with j-pop music. I am an anime fan and like some theme songs from them. I just started to work this out for myself. I created new custom tags like title romaji and title kanji. so I have three titles for the song, the main title the default title I have as english and romaji is the name for japanese using roman characters and kanji is the title in actual japanese written language. similar I will have at least two artist tags one being the default that I will put roman character artist name and the kanji title tag. depending on the artist like a band or something I might have a third that is actual english version of the name. what I would like to see is for the database and the program to be updated so that there is a tag for as many languages as possible and that a setting showing default or primary language for user decides which language gets placed in the default title tag but that all languages or ways of writing the title are in their own tag and preserved. I prefer to have as much info as possible so I wouldn’t mind extra tags on the files.

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