A karaoke has no lead instrumental track.
An instrumental does have one.
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I would’ve used the “edit” relationship too, in the future I’d like to have an “instrumental” attribute that can be selected for this relationship.
I agree with this logic, I wouldn’t link an edited version of a recording to a work.
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I would definitely link it to the work. They can also be linked to other recordings if appropriate, but they’re still definitely recordings of that work. Keep in mind MB recording is a mix, not an actual “put some mics on and record things” recording.
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Ok it’s best to link the instrumental version to the work of the original version and don’t link the recordings until an appropriate r-r relationship exists?
But does that mean then that a recording that samples two seconds of the recording XY is also a recording of the work XY?
No. An instrumental is work X without the lyrics, so it’s the same work (an orchestral version of the song would be too). Something that just samples is a new work, based on the old one.
If we had work X (an instrumental) and then someone put lyrics to it, that would be two works.
Now that you reformulate I can understand this topic.
An instrumental version of a work is for instance when a band covers a song with instruments.
I don’t understand why we would link recording‐recording as you need a lead instrument that was not part of the original recording, it’s a new recording, at least this lead track of the mix.
In hip hop at least, an instrumental is literally the song without the rapper.
Yes many karaoke are eroneously called instrumentals nowadays so it is important to specify if we mean really instrumental or just vocals-less mix, also could be called instrumental tracks only.
What I am talking about is what you often find on singles: The original version, an instrumental version and an a capella version. If you play the latter two at the same time you get the original again.
As I said in the other thread is now makes perfect sense to me that it’s a recording-work relationship, as it’s definitely not a new work (whereas I’d often consider a cover a new work), I just think the relationship for acapellas should be found at the same place.
So you are right about linking recording-recording in addition to recording-work.
We can use karaoke to link so called instrumental (lead-vocals-less mix) to original recording and erh edit or remix (that is a good question) for acapella (lead-vocals-only mix).
Karaoke suggests the point is to sing on top of them, but it isn’t.
A rap track from which you remove the vocals but the point is not to sing on top of them?
What’s the use?
They can be reused (often with different lyrics), which means they are to sing on top but not really karaoke-like, or they can just be listened to as instrumental tracks (instrumental hip hop is a genre in itself).
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We could turn our recording-recording karaoke relationship into karaoke/backing tracks, couldn’t we?
Thus it could be used for that.
And then we could have the opposite recording-recording lead vocals only, or something like that.
It looks like there are three cases:
One for acapella (i.e. vocals tracks only).
One for instrumental/karaoke (i.e. vocals tracks dropped but not replaced).
One for instrumental/cover (i.e. vocals replaced with non-vocal versions).
For the first two, it seems to me like these work as attributes (vocals-only and no-vocals, respectively) on partial-recording-of (for r-w) and edit-of (for r-r).
The last case in my mind requires a separate work; with a version-of w-w rel, optionally with an attribute (vocals-replaced). For this case, a direct link between recordings is less obvious, but for direct re-use of the non-vocal tracks, either a new rel (not sure which category; there are arguments for both edit and compilation) or a vocals-replaced attribute on edit-of might work.
To my mind, this would make the karaoke rel obsolete.
(Or regular recording-of, of course, if partial explicitly only means partial duration and never partial contents)
Naming/UI would be a separate discussion.
First two are not adding new recording while third one adds some recording (some sound).
It is no longer only just a change in the mix of existing tracks.
All three are linked to the same work, partial for the two first ones, instrumental for the third.
First two are linked to that regular complete recording they are edited from.
IMO. For me nothing is badly missing here, and we do not need new works for each new recording as we have relationship attributes like partial and instrumental.
The first two indeed are simply different edits of the same mix. So different recordings, same work. There’s a third, probably rare, case too: one where the lead track(s) of a vocal-less piece are isolated (sort of an instrumental acapella).
For the r-r rel, flags on edit-of seem appropriate. For the r-w rel, the current instrumental-recording-of is too ambiguous; I’d want mutually exclusive flags with a clearer meaning (“vocals only”, “backing tracks only”, “lead tracks only”?) I suppose simply adding an acapella flag also works (with both together covering the lead-tracks-only case), but then the descriptions of the flags needs to make their use clear.
But the last type to me will almost always warrant a new work; arrangement-of seems like the proper w-w rel to use. Here too there is a case I missed: a vocal-less piece that later has vocals added (either new addition or replacing existing lead tracks). So adding mutually-exclusive “vocal” and “instrumental” flags on arrangement-of seems to cover that.
It’s not ambiguous for me if you are talking about those two cases:
The first one is clearly what the instrumental attribute is made for as indicated by the documentation:
For works that have lyrics, this indicates that those lyrics are not relevant to this recording. Examples include instrumental arrangements, or “beats” from hip-hop songs which may be reused with different lyrics.
In the second case I’d choose instrumental + cover.
PS: Since the partial attribute was also mentioned: The way I understand it this is not for instrumentals or acapellas of the entire work, but rather for small parts of the work:
This indicates that the recording is not of the entire work, e.g. excerpts from, conclusion of, etc.
Maybe you’re editing classical where there are works for new arrangements.
But in non classical, arrangements are done on recordings, otherwise, works would have no more reason of being.
An instrumental cover, a live recording, a dub version, a different genre cover, … all these will be linked to the same work, I don’t need/want one work per new recording version.
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