YAY!! DNA now has his Audio Plays correctly categorised. I assume someone is hitting a “Yes” button on my batch of changes there as they seem to have mostly flown through after a slight delay.
This is VERY handy for DNA. Some of his recordings are directly spoken from his books, others are fully fledged plays with actors and very different.
DNA is a project of mine. The more I understand Recordings and the other parts of this place, that is all then fed back into this artist. You should have seen how chaotically disorganised this was last year!!
Why do you say DNA? I see Douglas Adams.
Oh I see in Wikipedia, his full legal name is Douglas Noel Adams.
Not very obvious. Like if you say DRJ for David Bowie.
I’ve thought about that one before. If you are looking for it in a shop it is under Audiobooks. And some of the covers use the word. I also use MB for tagging my files and the Audiobook category would still be important to many.
I see Audiobook as a parent category, but once Audio Play gets some traction elsewhere it would make sense to drop it.
@highstrung I would think Audio Play fits both of those well. They are multi-actor events working from a script broadcast on radio.
Radio Play would be more accurate for the examples we’ve used so far, but there are recordings of Theatre performances that will now be categorisable as “Audio Play”. Something performed to an audience and not just read from the page.
I’ve been a fan for a while… The fans know who DNA is. He’s in our genes.
Now should the Audiobook Style Guide be applied to audio plays, especially the section about the release artist?
IMHO No.
An audiobook has usually one to three narrators who can be listed in the artist credits as " read by XXX". That honours the role of the narrators, mimics how the narrators are credited on the cover and it helps to differentiate between audiobooks of the same text by different narrators.
Audio plays usually have more voice actors and it doesn’t help anyone if they are listed in the artist credits of the release.
The CSG approach makes IMHO much more sense: Credit the original author and the artists that are prominently featured on the cover and/or spine. Use Advanced Relationships for the voice actors.
It would be nice to have a style guide specific for audio plays or at least an amendment to the Audiobook Style Guide. It should also help to categorize a release as audiobook or audio play.
Something like this makes sense to me from the very little I know about these plays (which is basically what I learned from y’all here!). How do the covers of these usually look? (for those which are not just broadcast but actually released on CDs or whatever).
Agree with @Yurim - Audio Plays are written by someone and they should be in the Artist role. The numerous actors then appear in the Relationships.
The Monty Python example earlier fits this neatly. The Artist is clearly “Monty Python” and the relationships can give more details about that performance. Actors are only really vocalists. The actors of a play are like an orchestra of voices.
Here is an example that is already well filled out.
This is a BBC Radio Drama. A full play that was based on a book. The books authors are credited here as the Artist even though they didn’t actually write the play’s script. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll see all the actors are credited as “Spoken vocal” with their character in the play then listed in square brackets…
So far every example in this thread are for plays that have been broadcast on BBC Radio or US Radio. And then put out on official CDs by the radio station. Many of both Adams and Pratchett’s were originally based on books but have been re-written for the multi-actor performances. Both authors also put out plain “read from the page” audiobook versions too.
Generally the BBC Audio release will credit the writers as Artist on the spine of the CD. Or when it is a comedy group like Monty Python or The Goons then the group gets the credit.
I also think it is worthwhile seeing what people have already been doing when entering this data in MB. There are a lot of sensible people here so rules like “Author as artist” seem to already be in place.
I’ll whack mine on the scanner later this afternoon…
I noticed something funny with these BBC plays on CD. Notice how the BBC company who puts these works out is called “BBC Audiobooks Ltd”. That ISBN number is tying them to the Book world too.
That Moby Dick example cover is good. There is a HUGE output of these on that BBC Audiobooks Ltd label. They are pretty good at getting authors and actors credited on the covers. (Well, they have been on the Radio so no doubt already sorting out the royalties)
I don’t like what has happened to the artist on that release. Someone has added too many details - director shouldn’t be there. I much prefer the layout of credits on the Good Omens example as they fit better to the MB way of crediting performing artists.
ZBS Media/ZBS Foundation is an organization that releases original audio dramas. Some of them were originally broadcast on radio, but many (especially the more recent ones) were not.
This is important to me too, but I think the correct solution is to configure Picard to handle this. Surely tagging is a function of the tagging software. (“_secondaryreleasetype” works, as does “genre” for the folksonomy tags)
One other thing. What should the primary type for audio plays be? Obviously “Broadcast” for productions made for and by radio. What about original productions made just for sale on cassettes or CDs (or as digital data)? “Album” – in analogy to what we would use for opera or broadway musicals? (This would be my choice). Or “Other” like we mostly have for Audiobooks?
Once the main edits have settled in on my DNA changes, I’ll hook that “Audiobook” type from the “Audio Play” versions.
The more we talk, the more I convince myself of there being no need to still say “Audiobook”. A book is read word for word from the page. Sometimes sections skipped (abridged versions) but the descriptions on the pages are read equally to the speaking parts. Yeah, maybe there will be a few accents \ silly voices \ guests reading parts. But in the main it is a book being read.
The Audio Play has been changed from the original book to give that performance before an audience. Speaking parts for actors, and maybe a narrator filling in the descriptions. Many plays may never have been in book form. Or it could be comedians doing sketches (Python\Goons).
The “Broadcast” type helps for those shows that did actually go out on Radio. So the ZDS shows mentioned above that didn’t go out on Radio won’t have the broadcast type set.
I don’t think these are “Albums”. Not at all. An “Album” is mainly for music. So @chabreyflint’s question I would agree “Other”. Keep them distinct from the musical side.
Edit: Now I look closer at my queue of Open Edits on DNA I can see that only five of them can’t be done now. So I am correcting these now. Ready to hear lots of swearing from me if they all get caught in a 7 day limbo!
Edit2: Yeah… typical… removing Audiobook from the type has them all stuck in limbo for a week…
The area that was worrying me was not just Picard. It is the other Third Parties who use the data on this site who will not yet know of this forum discussion. If someone is dipping into the data and knows to look for “Audiobook” as a type they are going to need to be psychic to know that we are now changing some “Audiobook” to “Audio Play”
The simple solution to that is to flood as many edits as possible into the MB system. The more of these we can correct, the better. The external users will then come hunting us down to find out why their Audiobooks disappeared and will find out all about the new Audio Play option.
Though I am going to wait for a few more debaters to join this debate here on the thread so we can make sure there really is a sensible consensus on this.
I would say that in the case of physical releases they are albums: An album is basically just a collection of physical discs (compare to a photo album: it remains a photo album no matter what the subject of the photos are)
Items that are broadcast should be “other” rather than album, though.
The fans know who DNA is. He’s in our genes.
Seriously… that was accidental. Not just pandering to the DNA fans on here who know the importance of 42.