Merge recordings with/without gapless fades? - The Weeknd - Hurry Up Tomorrow

The release group Release group “Hurry Up Tomorrow” by The Weeknd - MusicBrainz is a weird one.

First, you have the full length album release variants, which are pretty much all the digital media releases. Additionally, you have some CD releases. I’m going to focus on these two releases

Now, if you look closely none of the recordings on that CD variant are shared with any of the other releases. That’s OK, this album has only been out for a few days.

The thing about the CD variant, is that it looses all the “concept albumness” compared to the full length album. That means that each song on the CD is designed to be standalone and none of the tracks fade into each other. On the full length variant, most songs are designed to fade nicely into one another.

I’ve started merging the recordings as I see fit, but I’m now realizing that the track lengths are different for a reason: these are different! Now, there’s been some discussion here before about when to merge or not to merge, but each track differs in how much it differs (if that makes sense).

It seems that all of the lengths are different, but most seem similar enough to merge, and some do not seem similar enough to merge.

Starting this thread to get specific thoughts on this release and maybe get others opinions. My use case for this is having both versions of the album in Plex and sharing ratings between the tracks that are similar enough.

If recordings are overlapping other tracks and therefore have different start\ends then they should be different recordings. Just like you would see on a mix album.

If a recording is just a fade out, then it can be different recording.

Personally, as a test, I will often put the two tracks into Audacity and see how well they sync up.

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For such a case, I did mark recordings as either stand‐alone single version and seamless album version (in my case it was single vs album).

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