Hi! I’ve run into a couple of questions while organizing and adding music I’ve made:
- If I rework a recording, like cutting down and restructuring a 9-minute track into a 2-minute version on a later album, is that relationship a “remix,” an “edit,” a “sample”, or something else entirely in MusicBrainz?
- I assign catalog numbers to all my releases. Some I assigned at the time of release, while others I added retroactively (maybe more analogous to how classical works are cataloged).
Would it make sense to use MusicBrainz series to represent each of the three cataloging systems I’ve used? And if so, do you think I should remove the retroactively assigned numbers from releases that didn’t originally have them?
Thanks in advance!
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I’m no expert on edits/remixes/etc, but to get the ball rolling - my guess for the first one would be ‘edit’?
The catalogue question gets my attention though. Hopefully I don’t get lynched for this, but catalogue number is probably the only aspect of a release where I think it’s useful to retroactively update a release… for physical releases I think it’s important to have/keep the printed catalogue number, but otherwise, imo, take the label at their word, even if it’s later in time!
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Thank you!
I’ve now added the “edit of” relationship to the relevant recording.
I think for the catalog, I might start by making the series I have in mind, since I think it’s probably the best way to describe them, and would make it easy to see my releases across performance names and label incarnations as well as putting them in order, which (due to dates being no more precise than a year on a lot of them) isn’t clear in the current data.
Assuming no one objects to the existence of the series, I think I might hold off on putting any more retroactive catalog numbers in the main catalog number field. Hopefully that dodges that dangerous looking can I see there.
Thanks again. 
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if you’ve got a personal label, that makes it simpler, but you could probably also just add the catalog numbers to the [no label] entry too. I’ve done this for my own releases, and it doesn’t seem too uncommon either, looking at random selection of the listings
that said, a series could maybe work as well, especially if it’s cataloging release groups or something like that
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Ah, I’m afraid I’ve managed to complicate it too much to quite fit the data neatly into the label model, probably.
Thank you though, that would make a lot of sense in a simpler situation!
I’ve had ~three personal labels/brands over time, currently in MB as “renamed from”/“renamed into” relationships between each other. I’ve also got some releases that are [no label], mostly less “official” releases, for lack of a better term. The catalog numbers are official for the labels, but I’ve also assigned catalog numbers in the same numeric series/numbering systems to some of those specifically [no label] releases. So there’s not really a way to see all the releases in a given numbering system in any one place with the way they’re currently entered, which is part of what makes me think release series might represent the data better.
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