Recordings, orphaned, merged

MusicBrainz
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I caught a merge that looked fishy (not the merger’s fault, this RG is a horrible mess) and dug into what seemed like the right answer, but having just read something about orphaned recordings, maybe I should have done the edit differently.

A release contains a track “Overprotected” that is really “Overprotected (The Darkchild remix) (radio edit)”. The track is linked to a recording for only that track. There exists a recording for other occurrences of this track; the two recordings have the same AcoustID. (The derivation for why I know this is nasty, but is in the edit comment.)

So, I renamed the track on the release and reassigned it to the existing recording. Then I thought about it — the old recording will be orphaned, and then what? My options seem to be:

  1. Keep the edit as is. When it clears, delete the orphaned recording.
  2. Keep the edit as is. When it clears, merge the orphaned recording into the correct one.
  3. Scrap the edit; replace it with an edit that just changes the name of the track and recording. When that clears, merge the newly renamed recording into the correct one.

halp

https://musicbrainz.org/edit/113835770

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Since the old recording isn’t associated with any other tracks, you could just merge it to the remix instead of reassigning it.

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The main reason I delete orphans I find is when they have been orphaned a long time and have gained a mess of confused AcoustIDs. In those cases you don’t know what to merge them to.

Your example sounds like a newly made orphan, so an easy merge. I’d pick option 2.

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It turns out all of my Discogs links were stripped from the edit comment; without them it looks like I’m doing this just because I feel like it, so I withdrew it.