Many of the doujin releases I add to MusicBrainz have a preview cross-fade (XFD) or collection of track samples published to Soundcloud or YouTube, e.g. compllege’s recent release, In the Unusual Emotion has a Soundcloud preview.
These can be useful when matching recordings for later releases, or just as additional context for a release you’ve not heard.
They’re usually linked or embedded in special sites & discography pages, but not with any consistency, so I’ve been thinking of linking directly to them from releases or release groups. The “stream for free” link relationship seems the most relevant, but I’m hesitant to use it because it’s typically intended for releases that can be streamed in their entirety.
Is it appropriate to add external links from releases to these previews?
If so, is it appropriate to use the “stream for free” link type?
Personally, I never add SoundCloud previews as ‘stream for free’ (whether it’s one track medley or a playlist of one minute snippets) and I encounter these a lot. I only do this when the release is fully available on SC and is uploaded by one official account, label/artist.
Ideally these promotional previews warrant yet another type of url relationship, because they are so ubiquitous, they often provide a lot of useful information and rarely get taken down.
For this situation, I think you can add a standalone recording, add the “stream for free” relation to it, then link it to each of the (full) recordings using the DJ-Mix relationship. For an example of such a recording, albeit without the streaming relation (this one actually was released on a CD):
I wrote a ticket to add preview attribute to existing URL relationship.
I was wondering if it should not be a release group to URL relationship, instead.
Feel free to comment, vote, fix my description:
@draconx, I would myself link a URL OK. But I would never spend my time creating recordings, etc. just for a preview page.
