Releases with identical musical content, but different languages for title and track names

MusicBrainz
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I have a CD whose title and track names are dominantly German, here’s a picture on Amazon.
A release with the same barcode and catalog number is already in MB: Boccherini; Petersen Quartett: String Quartets, title and track names are in English, though.

How should I add the German version (if at all)? Adding

  • an all new release group with the German title?
  • a new release to the same release group?
  • aliases to releases title and track names?

To clarify: the recordings are the same, this is not about different language versions of songs.

Another, more pronounced example I stumbled over: The Yellow Guide to Opera and Der Opernführer have identical DiscIDs. Their recordings should probably be merged, but what about the release group? The titles are very different, after all.

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It sounds to me like you are describing a release for a different territory. If the contents of the disc are identical, then it is a New Release in the same Release Group.

I would also say yes to merging those other two Release Groups.

I am not heavy on my classical editing, but it looks like something seen in the bootleg world. Same disk just get resold repackaged and re-released again and again with different labels stuck on it. When it is basically the same “release” in different clothing it should be sharing a single Release Group.

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Same release group, same recordings, different release sounds correct, yeah :slight_smile:

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OK, thanks, I’ll do it this way.

Any thoughts about what the title of the shared release group should be? As a general rule, I tend towards using the English title, simply because more people will understand it.
So in the opera example from the opening post, the release group will be called “The Yellow Guide to Opera” and one of its releases will be “Der Opernführer”?

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I would usually try to pick the most common title. Or the “original release” to use as the name. This one is confusing as they both were released at the same time. So I’d be lazy and pick English with the German in brackets. Covers all bases then and should still be found by people trying to match the disk.

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For RG title, here, I would choose German as it’s a German project. :grinning:

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