edit: Thread title has been corrected as per Hawke’s comment. Will leave rest of thread untouched.
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/48075791
has “Dirty Dancing: 20th Anniversary Edition” being changed to “Dirty Dancing (20th Anniversary Edition)”
Where italics indicate a disambiguation. front CA
Seems very counter-intuitive to me. But I find many release namings weird anyway so that is no surprise.
Whilst I doubt this styling can be explained in explicit terms, can the “sense” of “what a release title is” be conveyed connotatively?
For me, those subtitles are really version names, they fit the comment better than a real subtitle.
In Star Wars: A New Hope (anniversary edition) where bold is that edition/version name rather than real subtitle, A New Hope.
I may be beginning to understand.
On MB “title” is not natural language with the common meaning.
Rather it is a technical term, jargon, where the common meaning has been replaced with a meaning that suits the needs of an encyclopedia where metadata needs to be created and related.
That which might be seen as part of a album or single title in common language may have been categorised on MusicBrainz as the name of a series, version, label, performer, composer, … .
A MB title will be created out of these and other components in a way that (hopefully) optimises the utility of the created title in the database.
This sounds complex and not user friendly.
However in actual use it works very well.
And minor tweaks to the system continue to improve the user experience.
In short:
A new user will be able to recognise the specific album or single a MusicBrainz title is referring to.
However to construct a MusicBranz title takes training and expertise.
If we simply go by what the documentation says, it should be in parenthesis.
I am not in favor of reducing it to a disambiguation comment. Doing that removes it from tagging, This release was sold and advertised as the “20th Anniversary Edition” alongside Bluray and DVD releases.
I’m not really concerned if there is technically a way to tag the comments in Picard. Picard isn’t the only front end that accesses the service.
My point is that it should be part of the proper title by default. It’s printed on the release so it’s not a “comment”. It’s a deliberate part of the title.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches that lead to either;
Dirty Dancing: 20th Anniversary Edition,
or,
Dirty Dancing (20th Anniversary Edition)
?
Whilst I find the more “natural language” approach easy to understand, if there are significant benefits from using a more synthetic title then maybe the increased artificiality is well worth it.
It’s not really part of the title though. The title is “Dirty Dancing”; “20th anniversary edition” is a bit of text that describes/distinguishes/disambiguates this edition from any other.
(Edit: Also, the cover art says “Twentieth” not “20th”)
