Les Paul & Mary Ford has 38(!?!) unique recordings of the same song - this can't be right?

Have a look at this:

It looks to me like Les Paul together with Mary, god bless them, are listed with 38 unique recordings of this song. I know it’s quite the banger, but surely that can’t be right?

That does seem a bit much. But it is possible.

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Presumably most of those are rereleases of the same recording, but without details how would one know for sure? It seems safer (and in keeping with MB best practices) to create new recordings unless you’re sure it’s the same as an already existing one.

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Could fingerprinting be used to figure it out?

Depending on the age of the recordings, many of them were likely automatically generated upon the NGS upgrade. From what I understand (as I wasn’t a member then) before NGS was implemented, there were only tracks, and when the upgrade happened all those unique tracks off various releases were converted into recordings. This left us with a slew of recordings, many of which were likely duplicates of one another, scattered all over the place. Many of these recordings have since been merged, but there are still others left to be found and merged as appropriate.

Sure, as long as there are AcoustIDs already present.

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Could fingerprinting be used to figure it out?
Perhaps, perhaps not. I have run some fingerprinting and a remaster can be identified as the same as the original track.

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As I understand MB style, original and remastered versions would be considered the same recording, so that wouldn’t be an issue.

However, finding someone with copies of all 38 releases and the time to fingerprint them…that seems more challenging.

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if someone did have all 38 of them, they wouldn’t really need to fingerprint them. They could listen to them and merge the same recordings.
In which case, there would only need to be 12-24 fingerprinted, because they already merged the obvious half.

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