I’m adding an album that was recorded in Aug 99 to Dec 99 but was released in 2000. The performers are cited for the album in general (release level), not the recording level. If I add a begin and end date for the performer relationships at the release level, what should I use as the begin and end dates? Should I use the dates the album was actually recorded or the date it was released? Thanks.
I think performer relationships should use the recording dates whether they’re at the release or the recording level.
Personally I’ve been entering them at the recording level even when they’re not explicitly credited track by track. The advantage of that is that if that recording gets reused on a compilation, the credits come along with them. That approach could be misleading if, say, there are 3 drummers credited on the album, only one of whom plays on any given track. In that case you are better off just listing at the release level.
I agree with @highstrung here. One idea that would get around the last problem would be the ability to define a new artist as a disjunction of other artists. (MB already supports conjunction, in the form of groups.) I have a few CDs of solo piano music credited to two or three different pianists who have made a conscious decision not to be individually identified on the tracks. With such an artist type the performers could be credited at recording level as well as at release level.
I would not, it is always difficult to know for sure that this person played piano or synth or chorus, etc. on that specific track if not said by booklet.
True, so far I have mostly been adding jazz albums where the track releationships can be clearly deduced. If there’s one performer credited for tenor saxophone on the album, and there is clearly tenor saxophone on all tracks, it doesn’t seem a stretch to enter recording level relationships. But I acknowledge there are many cases where it would not be so straightforward.
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obtext, I’m not sure that would help in most cases, except by an over-proliferation of one-off “disjunctions”. I was thinking of cases where multiple band members and/or session musicians are credited with “keyboards” or “percussion” or whatever. That specific combination of “the people who played percussion on this one album” would probably never again be used outside that one release, and there could be multiple such groups for a single album (“the people who played keyboards”, “the people who sang backing vocals”…) I think that for 99% of the cases, the ‘disjunction’ would add way more complexity than it’s worth.
I think that for 99% of the cases, the ‘disjunction’ would add way more complexity than it’s worth.
Yes, I think you’re probably right!
Thanks for the feedback guys! I’ve mostly been adding music local to my city, much of it rock and metal, and the album credits can be pretty sparse. I started wondering about adding dates to the performers when I looked at the relationships on the artist pages for some of the more prolific performers and saw big lists of album appearances with blank date columns. Most of the music I have entered does not include recorded dates, so it seems that most of these columns should remain blank with only a few, like my example above, being filled in.