Hi,
I’ve got a problem with Peter Gabriel’s Encore Series releases (almost all of his concerts are recorded and released). Most of them (of those currently in MB!) are found as official releases, some are bootlegs, but I think, it would be better to have them as promotional as they are flooding the Album+Live section now and I have some more to add. It’s really hard to spot the “real” official releases, which I don’t think the Encore Series are (though distributed like official releases). They are mostly unedited live recordings, some of them are of poor quality, but of course the quality of the recording cannot decide the status.
The hole section is a bit of a mess (titles often incorrect) and I will try to do some repair (at least for releases in my possession), but I think I should discuss this matter before I start editing.
It is tricky as the man wanted to release everything that was played live. And MB categories don’t have a way of separating them fully. The “live” added to the Release Group at least keeps them away from his studio albums.
He is not the only artist that happens with. Many are keen to put out CDs of every gig quickly after the gig. Some bands even manage to do this on the same night.
They are certainly not “promos” as they are part of a very specific series. Also sometimes they appear as a boxset as well.
You may notice a heap of edits from me a few months back. The aim was to clear up deeper chaos that was there. There is a series created for many of those tours. I was standardising the names to they at least grouped together better.
Did a lot of research, pulled in lots of art, and went full OCD on the titles to get them consistent. Its all in the edit notes.
To make a series, look at the top of the page for “Editing” menu. Then “Add Series”
Notice also that the group then lets you add a Release Group and set an order. Edit some of the above groups to see how it works.
This was my aim at bringing some order to the chaos in here. Like you I could see confusion hiding the various releases. There was a mad mess of inconsitent titles.
My aim was bringing order to chaos and kinda making a pattern for others to follow. It seemed fairly sane.
Sorry! I asked and haven’t read anything.
Thanks for the hint with series, that will bring order. And thanks for your work! I appreciate this very much!
I will try not to make it worse.
I still would prefer to have them out of official Live Albums, but probably they are.
The 2003 and 2004 series are the easiest ones to look at. Those had a very clear pattern. That is why I made a Release Series with them.
The 2007 tour gets messy as there are bootlegs out there, as well as a boxset. So the title patterns get less clear.
I waded in like you trying to get sanity in there. You should have seen the mess before I started!
I swept up some of the most obvious sets… until I got bored. The idea was to set the pattern that made it easier to see what was going on.
I also added disambiguation to the tracks to add gig locations. Edited recordings to add locations. The OCD went into OVERKILL on a mass tidy of those three tours especially.
Strange timing of your post. Have you seen that some else is currently in there doing some weird edits to the titles. I don’t have the time or energy tonight to go through them all, but they seem to be trashing some of my work. I better not do much voting tonight as I will be impolite as the first edits I saw him doing were against guidelines and coverart.
Anyway - I ain’t complaining at you as you clearly also want sanity. I’ll help if needed. especially with tips I learnt when editing the above.
No way round this really. They are official. So they need to stay in there. This is why I went for cleaning up the names to get them to group better so they are less messy when trying to find other types of live release.
Do feel free to ask specific questions. I did a lot of edits, and tons of notes, so there is too much to read for a sane person.
The 2003 series is the clearest. The 2004 series includes a bootleg. That’s why the wembley gig is using the guidelines for Live concerts instead of following the other titles. 2007 even madder as there are separate releases, releases in a box set, and bootlegs all in the same series. That is the point when I ran away screaming to see if I could find my sanity somewhere.
I haven’t done anything yet, just ordered my own recordings. In fact, there should be even more releases, because for the newer concerts I’ve got download codes for 96 kHz releases as well, but that wouldn’t be not more release groups, only more work to do
The Back to Front series will be relatively easy - information on all covers is (quite like 2003/4): Back to Front YYYY: DD.MM.YY, Place
More difficult will be the 2009 “Latin American Tour”. It was sold as a box (to me), but isn’t available anymore. On the cover is printed artist - date and place like this: 31·03·09 Monterrey Mexico
On the box cover is printed nothing, but I think it was called Latin American Tour.
I only cleaned up the releases already in the database. Cross referencing to Discogs and Peter’s site. There should be a link to the official store where I took a lot of the references from.
The 2009 is tricky. If it is a boxset, then really that is how it should be added to MB - as a boxset with multiple CDs.
I noticed these boxsets when doing the cleanup. And was kinda glad I didn’t bump into one. I think some of thoese releases in the 2007 should not actually be listed as separate relases as the artwork looks like the boxset edition… hard to be sure.
As to bootlegs? They can exist as they may be from a different angle. Or someone was in the habit of recording gigs and then released their own copy. Maybe it had tracks that were trimmed from the gig. Or maybe it was recorded from a radio broadcast? Or as you spotted sometimes Peter may not have had the release rights as the Festival may have owned the copyright on the performance. (No need to apologise to me )
I pulled them into the same Series as it was the same tour. And the idea was to have a series for the tour.
Good to see the 2009 was also sold as single gigs too. That makes adding them easier. And much nicer for artwork. Though, comically, it then means even more items added to that huge (album,live) list further confusing your OP.
I used that for a lot of the details for the tours I did work on. Then set the main sales page for the tour as the “home page” for those series.
Just thrown the Discogs link onto the 2009 Mexico gig. That is a handy cross reference. Loads of these are documented over there. They have a big Series of all the Encore works https://www.discogs.com/label/386574-Encore-Series
With my Creatiion of the Series I intentionally swept a little wider to make it a complete tour, hence adding the bootlegs.
To be honest - I don’t have a single one of these. All that work was from deep research. And a drive to bring order to chaos.
Then my appreciation again, I try to order too, that’s part of my job and I like it, but I just would not “find the time” to work on artists, I don’t want to listen to. But it very good, that you do such things.
(2009 tour had only 7 regular concerts)
It sounds a little daft, but if I am having a bad day then coming in here and doing some tidying up is very therapeutic. Bringing that kind of sane order to chaos gives me a strange satisfaction. Repetitive tasks like that help calm my head. Some people may grow a garden, I tend to the weeds in MB. Mad as that is to any normal person.
I can’t even remember what initially sent me down that rabbit hole. Something probably appeared in my Subscribed edits. Maybe was in the “So” 25th boxset.
It was probably caused by broken USA dates mixed in with proper dates. I am a big fan of live gigs and often see confusion caused by bad naming. Hence all those cleaned up disabmigurations on the tracks themselves. So that a clear 2003-04-05: appears on the tracks to take away confusion as to when it really happened.
And I didn’t say I don’t want to listen to Peter. I do have some of his studio albums. And was impressed as to how many live official releases he put out.
Every concert! It’s a nice feature to get a recording of the concerts that you’ve seen, even if sometimes they are poorly recorded or otherwise far from perfect. (Peter is notorious for his “fuck ups” as he tells… I exclude them from playlist for that reason)
This is a repetitive task? There’s research to do. But I known what you mean. Even concentrated work can help to calm down.
The repetitive parts was because I had to go deeper. I wanted to make sure the dates and locations were fully tied in.
For each track on each release I had to:
Link all tracks to works
Add in the correct Location to recordings
Add correct gig location as disambiguration text
Add gig dates where relevant
Add missing writer credits
Add artwork
Clean up Release titles to match covers while following guidelines
Go back and change the dots, dashes to better unicode compliance
Sure there were a few other steps. Was certainly nice to see the final results. I should have taken a screenshot before I started. Some of the releases were comical in how bad they were. It was the mish-mash of dates that was the weirdest thing to see. Especially confusing when a gig is dated 04.02.03 as there was no way to tell WHEN it happened as one didn’t know how to read it. Was it USA date? European date? Year first?
I know not everyone is as fussy or completest. I like a bit of clarity.
For relaxation I prefer to lay down a while listening to my music from correctly tagged audio files, provided by you repetitive tasks. That’s ideal!
I would love to have complete information in MB, but that’s impossible in principle. And I’m satisfied, if I have my own audio files represented, as complete as possible. But I promise I will try to make my contributions complete - including relationships, following guidelines and buying a desk scanner to be able to add artwork in acceptable quality.
I’ll help if needed. especially with tips I learnt when editing the above.
