Dvořák isn’t completely finished, and that’s mostly because fixing a million crappy Humoreskes or Largos from the New World would be a a pain in the ass for anyone. That said, it’s improved enormously, so thanks for all that work! But I think it might be time to (at least temporarily) change to something else, which hopefully includes less hard-to-find info
What do people think about working on a label instead? We could take something like the complete catalogue of hyperion (or Chandos, or some other label that provides full booklets), fix whatever we have, and add whatever we are missing. Is this something people would be interested in?
When I edit I tend to change it up. Sometimes I end up trying to fix a label (getting UPC/EAN, cat #, distributors on releases etc.). At other times I edit releases for an artist or sometimes I enter multiple releases missing in a release group, different formats etc. Doing always the same thing is getting boring. So I think it’s a good idea to change it for next month although I don’t think I edit a lot in classical music in general.
I’d definitely like to try something like a label, esp hyperion or chandos (I’d love hyperion, since I’ve wanted to take a thorough look at them for a while now)
+1 from me :D
I’d vote for Hyperion. I had some communication with them a few months ago to try and persuade them to put new releases on MB. They were responsive but lacked resources at the time. If we did a lot of work on the back catalogue, that might get them more engaged. Also they do quite a good job of artwork, PDFs etc plus reasonable tags. However, I don’t think they like the PDFs being available from others.
I would like a release group series for each of the compilations for each country and some of them use a different label from year to year.
Most of these are linked from the following wiki page https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Series/Ministry_Of_Sound
Sure we could try with a label this time. I see no harm done. Hyperion is recording a lot of rarely performed works so it would be fine for me.
For later we should also consider more popular composers. Not a big deal for me if composer data isn’t fully fixed during the cleanup month (or Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Beethoven are doomed forever). Some editors like to edit releases they have on their own collection (+adding high quality scans) and the more popular the composer is the more likely there’s more releases owned by our editors.
I’ll try (but no promise) to set up a page with the current state of releases we have or haven’t compared to their complete catalogue. It seems that we are missing ~2500 releases and we have ~15 hyperion releases without barcode or catalogue number
BTW, do we have userscripts to import releases from hyperion?
P.S.
I would have said the same about Bach but @ProfChris did it nearly on his own… I’d be happy if we could manage to clean the recordings of these composers to around ~1000 (i.e. not waste time on compilations but fix the rest)
That’s basically my approach, or at least the starting point. It is way more efficient to simply take a physical release out of the shelf and look into (or ideally scan) the booklet instead of spending hours of hunting the web for some thin info on those many low-quality, potentially self-contradicting entries in the database. Moreover, I have the personal benefit to have cleaned up the metadata for some of my own releases.
I have to check, but I’m not sure if there is even a single Chandos or Hyperion release in my collection. So I guess I won’t contribute much to your planned label clean-up.
This is why I specifically considered only the labels that have digital booklets on their websites The great thing about hyperion / Chandos is that you barely ever need to have the release in hand to get a lot of high quality info (of course it helps for acoustids and discids and stuff like that, but it’s not anywhere as necessary as with other labels). That said, I definitely understand the preference to clean up stuff already in your collection Who knows, maybe you’ll see something on the list that you might actually want to own!
Thanks folk for the comments.
Whilst getting JSB done was important to me it did get in the way of cataloging my own collection!
From my experience:
Compilations are a pain - often poorly documented and it takes a fair amount of effort to establish that!
I gained a lot of knowlege/experience by working through JSB which has helped considerably lately i.e. I know who has recorded what and where to look.
I spend a good session a week keeping JSB up to date!
In conclusion, I suggest: work composer by composer; maybe Mozart for a while then Schumann say but back to Mozart before the knowledge evaporates. The well documented lables are a plus!
