A lot of music I enter into MB is electronic dance, and that means I need to enter a lot of version information concerning different mixes and edits. Yet the guidelines for entering version information are not clear to me.
Titles and subtitles of mixes/versions are formatted according to the appropriate language's guidelines; the other parts of this extra information should be in lower case except for words that would normally be capitalised in the language.
Some examples are given as well:
Situations Like These (album version)
Bear Witness (Automator’s 2 Turntables and a Razorblade re-edit)
That seems straightforward: The titles and subtitles are formatted as usual, but all the version information between parentheses goes in lower case, except for names and such.
So let’s consider the Jam & Spoon version of “The Age of Love”
There is considerable variation here, but most versions are given as:
The Age of Love (Watch Out for Stella club mix)
My interpretation of the guidelines is that that should be:
The Age of Love (watch out for Stella club mix)
Not so fast: This is open to multiple interpretations. I found my edits reverted by another editor who interpreted the guidelines quite differently:
version information is stuff like: remix, live, remaster, edit, mix
everything i’ve made uppercase here are part of Titles
This makes sense as well: Only “mix” goes in lower case, and everything else is part of the Title of this particular version / mix. So according to that interpretation it should be:
The Age of Love (Watch Out for Stella Club mix)
So I guess my questions are: 1) what is the correct interpretation of the ETI style guidelines and 2) should the guidelines be clarified to allow only one interpretation?
As I understand the ETI guidelines, Watch Out for Stella club mix is correct because “Watch Out for Stella” is the title of this mix.
More examples or some kind of highlighting for the “Titles and subtitles of mixes/versions” in the existing examples would be sufficient for clarification, IMO.
This guideline reads complicated because of the special treatment of the English language in MB (Introduction of Own Capitalization Rules for Titles, follow the standard capitalization rules in some cases…), for (most) other languages this section won’t be necessary - as there are only the standard capitalization rules
(The Title Gets the Capitals) but (version)(edit)(re-edit)(mix)(live) get the lower case.
That is how The Age of Love (Watch Out for Stella club mix) reads as it does. The “Title Bits” are Caps, the “version” text is lowered. “club mix” is not seen as part of the title, but more of a description
As Kellnerd points out, this is made more complex by the unusual rules used here for Capitalisation of the English Text. Kinda funny that us English speakers trip up over those rules more than most.
Thanks for the clarification. If I understand you guys correctly my example consists of two parts: “Watch Out for Stella” (the name of the mix) and “club mix” (a description).
Two comments:
If your interpretation is indeed the correct reading of the style guidelines, this does not at all become clear from reading them. Perhaps that’s just because English is not my mother tongue, but since MB is an international community I’d say that warrants some clarification. More examples, like kellnerd suggested, would be swell.
I can think of dozens of examples where the difference between “name” and “description” simply does not exist. Just to name a few:
So where does the name end and the description start? Is “vocal club mix” the description, or the parts “new”, “vocal”, “club”, and “mix” or perhaps just “mix”? My opinion is that the entire string between parentheses is the name of the version.
There’s plenty more where that came from. Bottom line is, the difference between “title bits” and “version info” is in many, if not most, cases non-existent.
For grey areas, you’re supposed to just pick something that makes sense. It might be that both options make sense - if so, pick your favorite!
In general, the idea is as implied above - the remix title gets title case, as shown in the “Automator’s 2 Turntables and a Razorblade” example (only “Automator” is a name there the rest is capitalized specifically because it’s the title).
Happy to get some extra examples for the guideline that show it, if they feel needed. They can be added to the wiki (make sure to link to the recording like with the existing ones!) and then I can take a look and publish the changes if they look good
Frankly, I’d be in favour of requiring either single or double quotes around mix titles. That removes any ambiguity between a trailing word of the tile and the lowercase post-title words. This would probably be especially nice in cases where language titlecaps only initcap the first word (I think French has this).
In the case of Oscillator (Electronic Flirtation Device) it’s not clear to me whether that is ETI or the whole thing is an alternate title for “Oscillator”. The capitalization you’ve used would suggest the latter, in which case it probably shouldn’t be used as an example of ETI.
If you follow the “recording of” link to the works page, you’ll find this is an alternative mix of the original “Oscillator” song. It might as well be called “Electronic Flirtation mix” or such.
This is exactly what makes this such a pickle in some cases, and I hoped this example would make clear what happens to ETI without “descriptive parts”, like mix, edit, etc. Apparently I failed
I don’t think you failed. You have just managed to show how complex the world of remixes is. A mix can get some quite strange titles. And you are fighting against a number of editors who want to remove everything from titles. I think some of these editors may not be used to all the wide variations that remixes bring us.
I would only suggest the removal of that particular example because it is more of an edge-case, and I think confuses the reader by including it just above the section regarding subtitles. Not that I believe it ought to be moved to the subtitles section though. I think it ought to be omitted as an example because it’s less than clear as to what is a subtitle, ETI, etc, (and edge-use cases should just be swept under the rug for users to argue over their use later )
Besides that which myself and others commented on, I think you’ve definitely improved the guideline for those of use entering ETI on nearly every release, thank you . I would like to also make a note that phrases such as “refix” “bootleg” and any variant of “re-*” should be treated just as “mix” “edit” and “version.”
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