Release vs release group series - later releases

So just as I was getting everything hooked up to the new Compact Jazz release group series, @drsaunde found this: https://www.discogs.com/Sarah-Vaughan-Sarah-Vaughan/release/12416881

It’s one of the releases in the series, reissued outside the series in 2003. So I entered all the edits to switch it back to a release series instead of release group. But then I got to thinking, do later releases outside the series invalidate the release group series? I’m sure it’s not super common, but it also seems like an awful headache for maintenance. ANY release group series could instantly become a release series just because someone decided to issue one of the releases LATER as a standalone. It seems to me that if the original release was part of the series, it should still be a release group series. What do you all think?

(There’s a secondary consideration in this case, which is that the Compact Jazz CD series was COMPACT Disc releases, which as you can see in Discogs existed alongside WALKMAN Jazz releases on cassette. I would argue that they’re effectively the same series, although there’s certainly a case to be made that they’re actually parallel release series.)

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'ang on… ain’t we had this conversation before? :grin: Top of the Poppers Release Series vs Release Group Series?

Trouble is there is no simple answer. It depends what one is looking for when selecting the series.

What seems fairly clear from these kinds of conversations is there could be a more automatic Series system. If a Release Group Series exists, then why can’t the database just give us an automatic Releases view of that Group?

If there is a Release Group Series, I would expect a script could easily read the members of that group and then list each of the Releases on one screen. Surely that would also save a lot of headaches in maintenance of these series?

It is just a thought, and I know it will be lost in a “make a ticket for it”, but is it daft doing this work twice. So many of these themed collections work as BOTH types of series.

This is a Relational Database. A Release Group series could easily be shown as a Release series and vice-versa.

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Apparently I just have very bad search mojo, because I looked for a related thread in this case too and didn’t find it. Ugh.

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Your lack of search mojo is as bad as my memory. As the most comical part of that thread is you started it and I was one of the people who responded :smiley: ( Release vs release group series - later releases )

I only found it due to “Top of the Poppers” being in there. (Comically I found a couple of those LPs in the street the other day leaning against a wall. Addiction to this place meant I had to stop the car and pick them up just so I could add them to the DB)

That ticket is a classic though - poor thing lost there since 2015.

Some of the problem is this is being looked at too much from a viewpoint of the database designer. It needs to be looked at by the database user.

There is a massive overlap between Release or Release Group series. IMHO any Release Group series should be displayable as a list of Releases as well.

Any Release Group series is, by definition, also a Release Series. So why can we not make a Release Group and then display a Release Series view?

And either style of group needs more options as to how it is displayed - the data show by the two different types of group is very different.

Let “Release Group Series” have a “Display Release Series” option. Then there would be no need to create both.

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Did you mean to link to different thread? :smiley:

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@psychoadept - hahah!! I blame your search mojo, it must be leaking. My copy pasta failed. :rofl: Try this one instead. How to change a release series to a release group series? (and other OT items)

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Oh, yeah. Remembering that one (though vaguely) was what led me to do a release group series in the first place. But based on the logic given in the other thread, which I do kind of agree with, it should probably be a release series, too. Yeah, it seemslike in general there should be a smoother way to go from one to another.

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