Is there a policy regarding digital media box sets? Specifically, whether to add it as one digital medium per original medium, or just a single digital medium for everything combined?
For example, The Beatles Stereo USB looks to me like a good way of going about this: one medium per original album. When you want to listen to it, you probably want to listen to a specific original album’s worth, not the entire artist’s catalogue at once, so it’s useful to have them split out in some way.
In contrast, Autechre’s EPs 1991–2002 has been merged into a single medium with absolutely everything in it. This may be technically more accurate, but it seems to me less useful to someone trying to listen to a single EP’s worth of music.
Is there a policy for this? Could or should there be?
I would have them in MB as presented until we get some way of dividing up tracklists/sub lists or whatever.
In the case of digital I feel like ‘presented’ = in different folders, or tagged as ‘disc 1/3’ etc.
I’ve done quite a few digital releases and I have a personal sort of house rule for them.
If it’s a downloadable files:
a) If the files are grouped into different categories by embedded metadata or folder structure, you can reflect that in separate ‘digital file’ groupings (see Mike Ladd - Welcome to the Afterfuture digital release)
b) If the release doesn’t include any of those groupings, it’s just one release (though you can say which tracks belong to which release in an annotation) (see Pere Ubu - Elitism for the People)
For physical releases with digital files, you have to put the correct number of physical carriers regardless of any groupings made explicit in metadata or file structure. So that Beatles release should only be one USB presumably. However, you can divide things up in the track name. See, for an extreme example: Arve Henriksen - Solidification. This has 2 DVDs with 3 different versions of the 4 releases on the records also included in the releases.