Notice that every detail is the same (release event, label, catalog no, Discogs link), just the number of tracks is different. I own this release, and actually there’s just one long track on the CD. The 13 tracks in the duplicate release probably come from botched Discogs import from Ammer / Einheit – Crashing Aeroplanes (2002, CD) - Discogs.
What is the right approach to proceed here? Should I merge all the 13 bogus tracks into the long one, fix the track listing and then merge the releases? Or is there another way?
You’re right it seems to come from bad/lazy Discogs import edit (it’s actually not super obvious that all these were sub track titles) and it does not contain any details that would come from a split rip (no fingerprints, no track length).
So you’re right you could merge as you explain.
But we could also just remove the release as well.
I think we could rename track and recording with multiple title style
Since this is one of our guidelines then I think we should, but I must say I don’t really like the way it looks. The way it’s presented in Discogs is much better IMO.
Would it be possible to somehow store the sub-titles for such long tracks as separate entities in the database, and display them in a way similar to Discogs? That would be a huge plus for readability. Has it been considered before? (I guess so, I can’t be the first person to come up with such idea).
A somewhat related one, but the opposite (ie., instead of splitting one track into finer segments, allow to group multiple tracks into a larger group (e.g., “Bonus”)):
I added an edit to change the track listing of your found duplicate release, so that the two releases can get merged together: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/69692102