"Karaoke" performance attribute (STYLE-2096)

Hi! The guidelines for the recording-work performance relationship type are fairly clear that karaoke recordings should not be marked as “instrumental”. This is not generally obvious for users (with good reason: many karaoke tracks are even marked “instrumental” to begin with). STYLE-2096 asks to add a second attribute alongside instrumental, “karaoke”, that can be used for these cases.

Do people feel like there’s a benefit on specifying whether a specific recording is intended for karaoke use on the performance relationship? Or should we stick to have this only indicated with a recording to recording relationship and maybe be more explicit about karaoke in the description of the instrumental relationship attribute?

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I’ve been using the recording-recording karaoke version of relationship alone.

But more recently indeed, maybe as I was feeling a lack of explicit karaoke mark on the work page,
to counter balance the often used but misleading instrumental* comment, I’ve been starting using the partial attribute of the recording-work recording of relationship.

So yes maybe it would be better with a specific attribute, or allow karaoke in partial attribute.

* In real instrumentals, the melody is performed by one or several instruments. In karaokes, the melody is omitted.

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I would think it would work better as a work attribute (Karaoke that is)

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wow, that was fast… I just put that ticket in like, a day ago~ :grin:

if this is added, this (or something like it) should probably be added to the help text for both. I’d probably specify it’s the vocal melody tho~

Oh no, it would generate twice as many works for pop songs, it would be cluttering for no use, I think.

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one potential issue with this that I just thought of, songs that have translations into multiple languages. therefore the instrumental (karaoke) versions would quite possibly be the same recording. there could be a conflict of languages relating one recording to multiple works with different languages? at least depending on how/if we need to deal with this…

as an example, Caramelldansen, a Swedish-language song, has several official translations, including Spanish, German, and one (or maybe two) English versions, as well as an unofficial Toki Pona translation. all versions have recordings that seem to use the same instrumental behind them, so I believe one karaoke recording could (in theory) be linked to all of the different language works and/or recordings. I think in this particular case, it was only ever released as a Swedish version karaoke tho~ (ウッーウッーウマウマ is a very common Japanese mondegreen from the Swedish version)

an odd edge case, but not too uncommon in my experience, especially for Japanese songs.

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Personally I think such a relationship attribute would be totally redundant.

If we want to mark karaoke recordings on the work pages then IMO this should be done on the MBS side by looking for the presence of “karaoke version of” relationships on the recordings.

If the goal is to prevent uninformed users from adding instrumental attributes contrary to guidelines, I think it should also be sufficient to just have the server warn users if they try to add this on recordings with “karaoke version of” relationships.

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MBS-11916

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I think my main worry is that a fair amount of those beginners might not even know that there is a recording-recording karaoke relationship, so a lot are probably not going to clash just because they won’t be adding that. But dunno, maybe I’m too pessimistic :slight_smile:

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@yindesu: I just wrote the code for that report, thanks for the reminder :slight_smile: That should be useful whether or not we decide to add an attribute, in any case, just the wording should change a bit, so can’t hurt to get it done (but we’re in schema change time so it might take a month or two for it to get released, no promises).

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I support the idea of having “karaoke” as a work-recording relationship attribute.

The recording-recording relationship is explicitly for marking “original karaoke” versions, where the karaoke version is an edit or different mix of the same recording - it doesn’t even cover all karaoke versions (in the west, karaoke versions are often - even usually - covers of the song by commisioned studio artists rather than by the original artist, and even in Japan there’s quite a lot of that happening).

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Maybe an automatic warning if “カラオケ” or “karaoke” are in the recording’s name?

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@kepstin’s argument sounded sensible to me, so I added this - can’t hurt IMO.

https://musicbrainz.org/relationship-attribute/3d984f6e-bbe2-4620-9425-5f32e945b60d

Guess now we need a script to change millions of work-recording karaoke attributes based on existing recording-recording karaoke relationships, since the definitions mean this should always be the case (but not the other way around).

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Yes please, my RSI kicked in doing one with 60 tracks :skull:

@loujine has a script to set different work attributes, it should be trivial for him to add an option for karaoke to it :slight_smile:

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Yeah - For anything that has the existing recording-recording relationship, the track on the ‘is karaoke version of’ side should by definition have the recording-work karaoke attribute added.

Is this something that can be done as a batch process?

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@reosarevok, there was some discussion on Discord re. if a ‘karaoke’ secondary release type might be in order as well? Has this been discussed before?

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I don’t remember it ever being mentioned, but I don’t follow everything. The closest I could find is this ticket, but I’m not sure if we would consider these should be separate RGs or not :slight_smile:

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