I’m new here and I actually use a lot of MusicBrainz’ format for my personal music library in iTunes. It’s become very helpful for getting a sense of consistency in how I label things. Previously, virtually every album did things differently.
I had a question when it relates to tracks that appear to contain two or more tracks within. I’m a huge film score collector, and many soundtrack albums feature multiple tracks or “cues” under the umbrella of one track; as I understand it, we separate these with a " / ". My question comes into play for several releases I’ve seen in MusicBrainz that seemingly don’t use this.
One example is the track “Main Title and the Attack on the Jakku Village” from the Star Wars: The Force Awakens soundtrack. Another, from the same album, is “The Jedi Steps and Finale”. Should these be as they are listed in the database, or should they be “Main Title / The Attack on the Jakku Village” and “The Jedi Steps / Finale”, respectively?
Another example is in James Horner’s score for An American Tail; MusicBrainz has the last track listed as “Flying Away and End Credits”. Is that correct as is, or should it be “Flying Away / End Credits”?
Basically, I’m wondering if there’s an exception to the " / " rule for main titles and end titles? Or are these entries merely incorrect, and need fixing? Thanks a lot.
In many CD’s I have, there are tracks (Medley or “Popurrís” in Spanish) that have tittles themselves and contains multiple tracks inside with own subtitles:
For example:
[Main tittle]: [Song tittles] - [Artist]
Medley Éxitos: Éxito 1 / Éxito 2 / Éxito 3 - Only One Artist for all Medley.
But I’m not sure about it.
and other example when it’s a mix of various songs with different artists:
Song Mix: Song 1 / Song 2 / Song 3 - Artist for song 1 / Artist for song 2 / Artist for song 3.
I’m not entirely sure, but I feel like the proposal linked from the ticket is a relic of the older attitude toward formatting; nowadays we prefer to follow whatever’s printed on the cover of the album itself. That does admittedly make it a lot harder to maintain a consistent music library, but the thought is that it’s easier for users who want to, to standardize things themselves (or get scripts and plugins to do so) than it is to recover the original information before standardization.
So, yeah, those tracks are likely correctly using an “and” to join the parts. If you look at the scan of pages 8 and 9 of this booklet, you’ll see that that’s how it’s printed, though the divider is smaller and italicized compared to the rest of the titles. It is admittedly a bit less clear in the database that the two names are separate, but there’s only so much we can do without rich formatting.
Thanks for the reply. I see what you mean, how the word “and” is a different style/font than the other words. So I’m guessing that those tracks in MusicBrainz’ database should be edited to “Main Title / The Attack on the Jakku Village”, “Farewell / The Trip” and “Finale / The Jedi Steps”? My understanding from reading the style guidelines is that any time a track title appears to contain two or more separate things, these should be separated by " / " regardless of what appears on the cover, for consistency’s sake. Do you agree?
Just trying to make sense of this; if this is the case, then I’ll just put " / " in between all tracks that seem to contain multiple sub-tracks. Including main titles and end credits tracks. Just seems there’s a bit of inconsistency in the database, and that’s what’s confusing me.
EDIT: Just re-read your post. So the style I’m reading may be a bit outdated, it seems.
I’m leaning towards what @WovenTales suggests too, but I’d also like to stress that you should associate Works to the Recordings/Tracks. This makes it clear that the Recording is actually of two “separate” Works, which can potentially allow sophisticated taggers, players, and/or other software to do stuff like auto-name the file or whatever. (And maybe I’d even do “Main Title and The Attack on the Jakku Village” as the Track title and “Main Title / The Attack on the Jakku Village” as the Recording title as well, or at least add the " / " variation as an alias of the Recording.)
