In plain english, not the “official” terminology. Also, if you could give an example of how or why to use them…
What is a Collection?
What are tags?
Ratings?
CD Stub?
A list of things, basically. Some people use them to keep track of what CDs they have. They can also be used for tracking what concerts you’ve attended. Additionally, I use them to keep track of what composers I’ve cleaned up (see my collection list). One useful bit of them is you can get a list of edits for the stuff in the collection, separate from the rest of your subscriptions (in my case, if I know I won’t have time to look at all my subscribed edits, I can just look at the edits for my cleaned up composers).
Tags are… tags, really. We have a basic writeup which isn’t very official-sounding 
We’ll probably add a way to use them for genres specifically soon, but they can be used for everything. For example, this is my list of tags - other people will probably mostly indicate genres, and then you have the “death by” series of tags.
That’s just like, your opinion, man. No, literally, ratings are just “I think this album is a 4 out of 5!” kinda thing. If you don’t care about that (I don’t) then you can just ignore them.
CD Stubs are an attempt at letting people who can’t be arsed to create an account submit something useful. The idea is that they submit some basic info for a release entry (a stub) coupled with a discID that identifies the release, and that can later be imported as a full release by someone else. To be honest, that last step rarely happens, although I’ve found some useful stuff there.
5 Likes
Let’s see if I got it…
Collection - Basically, I can “subscribe” to people, but not albums. I would place an album in my collection and be able to see when someone edits it.
A collection is basically something that is for me, not for the site (but can be made public if I choose). I can add a collection to my account and I am not going to get a bunch of “no votes” because one thing isn’t related to the next.
I guess, maybe, if you could give a brief explanation between a collection and a subscription, that may help as well.
Tags - Never saw that page. But, my confusion is, why can I hide them? And, other then the fact that everything is editable, why would people be able to delete them?
And, of course, since it is search-able, it should be “verifiable”? Like, I should not tag Pavarotti with Punk Rock or Porn Star.
Ratings - User opinions. Not a legal/verifiable rating such as Metacritic. My opinion, not a list/accumulation of sourced content.
And I forgot one.
What is ANNOTATION?
I understand what/why we use Disambiguation. But what is the difference with that and Annotation?
You can subscribe to entries in musicbrainz such as artists, labels etc.
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/subscribed
This can be useful to track everything that that person puts.
Collections are lists you make yourself.
The below collection contains my music collection and I keep track of edits to see if anyone is making stupid edits and making sure when people merge recordings that should be merged.
https://musicbrainz.org/collection/cd866349-1cd8-4cfa-9143-5c544ec0afce/open_edits
Tags are something that anyone with an account can add to an entry.
You can use this for genre but there are some problems with doing it this way.
This is part of the reason why I wrote a plugin to look up information from wikidata instead of just using crowd sourced tags.
Ratings is a 1-5 star rating that you can give to entries.
This is linked to your account and you can see the average and who gave what raiting on the site.
A disambiguation comment is a comment you can put on a release to distinguish it from another version.
For example you may have a different track list on a cd bought in one store vs another store or a deluxe edition with bonus tracks etc.
Annotations is a mini wiki where editors can add comments for other editors.
It can be useful to leave notes for the next person to look at that entry.
1 Like
Annotation – would you happen to have an entry with an annotation or two so that I can see it in use?
well, here’s an extreme example, a series where I’ve written a long annotation to provide details for myself and others: https://musicbrainz.org/series/303adb60-5787-459a-b02f-7164d6515b3c
I’ve put shorter annotations on many individual shows in that series.
1 Like
so we aren’t necessarily talking about tiny little notes limited to 20 characters.
Got it.
So, to summaries…
Collections are just another way of “following”, much like subscriptions.
Tags are little words and phrases, like genres.
Ratings are just my opinions.
Annotations are “free form” writing.
Pretty much! They’re freely licensed though, so they can’t be used for copying liner notes or the like - but coming from WP I assume you know how that works
You can up- of down-vote existing tags if you feel strongly about them one way or the other
That gives each tag a score/weight. So eventually we should be able to answer the important questions like “is Pavarotti more or less punk than Lynelle Pierce?”
3 Likes