Is there a standard way to reflect that a song has been split between two sides of a record?
This seems to happen on occasion when a song that fits on a CD needs to be split up because the whole thing doesn’t fit on on side of a record. Here’s a couple of examples:
Full disclosure, I made the Natural Snow Buildings one so I’m a little biased.
So I see two different approaches here. Motorpsycho sees the two parts as the same recording (https://musicbrainz.org/recording/56eadb17-cd90-499d-b1ae-ecf8c94efe6e). For Natural Snow Buildings, each part is a seperate recording that’s considered an ‘edit’ of the full recording. I also linked the parts to the work as a partial recording. Swans is set up to do this, as the parts are separate recordings from the CD equivalent.
Even though the aggregate of the tracks would indeed match the corresponding CD recording, there is indeed no direct way to enter that.
The recordings should link to the (full) work using partial-recording-of.
The recording names should have something like “part N” or “vinyl track N” as part of their name (or maybe disambiguation).
You could optionally create a “Foo (vinyl split)” series and add the partial recordings to that.
Alternatively, does the release editor allow a string like “A2/B1” or “A1,B2” as track number?
Then you could just use a single track linked to the full recording. This assumes a clean split (no fades etc) and would lose info about separate track times (could be put in the annotation).
I would definitely not do this. MB should reflect reality as closely as possible, and that means separate sides are separate tracks.
I would create three recordings: one for ‘side A’, one for ‘side B’ and one for the ‘CD release’ track. Then link them with the “compilation of” relationship which I believe is intended for this purpose.
I didn’t notice that relationship; it does seem somewhat applicable, although it seems intended more to reflect a recording containing multiple standalone recordings (i.e. the parts are the “master”). Here, the combination is the “master”, which is subtly different. Of course, the description could simply be updated to explicitly mention this use case too.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. ‘compilation of’ seems to reflect an aggregating relationship, this is more of a ‘splitting’ relationship. ‘Split from’ and ‘Split into’ might work as a new relationship? Honestly, though, I still think ‘edit’ might be the best solution the more I think about it.
You’re quite correct, but if I recall discussion when that relationship was created it was meant to work that way. I could be mistaken, but maybe @reosarevok remembers.
Either way it seems better than the other options.
That’s supposed to work like that, yes. We’ve talked in the past about renaming this relationship, but it still hasn’t happened (at least partially because I’m not sure what to).