Odd sorting of recording status

MusicBrainz
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1

I just noticed something odd. I must not have spent much time in the past looking through all the releases a recording appears on. I think I would have noticed this before.

This recording has 4 pages of “Appears on releases.” The first page starts with “Official” releases, then there’s a section of “Promotion,” then “Bootleg,” then “(unknown).”

The natural assumption is that page 2 would start with additional “(unknown)” releases, followed by sections for the remaining possible Statuses, if any.

In actuality, every page of results repeats the order of “Official,” “Promotion,” “Bootleg,” “(unknown).” The releases within each section are not repeated, meaning Page 2 has different “Official” releases than page 1, etc. Each Status list is broken apart across all 4 pages (except “(unknown)” does not appear on page 3, and “Promotion” does not appear on page 4).

That seems odd to me, and I can’t imagine a scenario where it would be useful. Is this a known/intentional design? If so, can anyone explain the rationale?

This is the case for any recording that has 2 or more pages of releases it appears on.

https://musicbrainz.org/recording/90141c46-0f99-4435-a90a-af666d6599b7?page=1

2

it seems to be going by year, note that the first page has releases up to 1999, and that’s about where the second page starts, going to 2008, which is where page three starts

that does seem like an odd design choice to me too, and it would make more sense to sort these by the overall status headings, then by year

1 Like
3

By release year seems logical. The Release pages are by year. So are Release Groups. This page just follows that same pattern. Consistent across the website.

From what I see the recordings are all sorted by release year. Split into pages. Then a page view is separated into Official/bootleg/Promo/Unkown.

I disagree with this. Look at those “unknown” as an example. By sorting by year it is easier to spot how many of those “unknown” are just uncategorised Official release.

1 Like
4

I agree, tracks are and should be sorted by release dates.
Maybe we could remove that official/bootleg/unknown groupings, though, they tend to confuse everyone.

5

I see that list and the (unknown) category encourages me to go look at those releases and update the data. I bet most of those could easily be properly categorised.