Sort names style for Releases?

MusicBrainz Style
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I would like to use sort names of releases as part of my music cataloguing. Most of my collection is in English, so practically this means a release like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, where a sort name would be “Dark Side of the Moon, The”.

The Release and Release Group entities do not have the “sort name” field which the Artist entity enjoys. However, one can supply an Alias incorporating a sort name to a Release or Release Group. That is helpful.

The Style/Aliases guidelines don’t really talk about Releases or Release groups, and how to use aliases as a way of supplying sort names for them. The example of sort names are of Artists and Place names receiving sort names via aliases.

A particular question is: should sort names be provided via aliases of Release entities, or of the corresponding Release Group entities, or both?

A case in point is release-group/f5093c0 The Dark Side of the Moon, by Pink Floyd. It has release group aliases in English and Japanese. The English language alias supplies the sort name, “Dark Side of the Moon, The”. The Japanese language alias supplies both the localised Release Group name “狂気” and the localised sort name “きょうき”, as expected. But sampling the 138(!) Releases in that group, I don’t see any with aliases of any kind, let alone an English language sort name. See, for example, release/df8fe00, the 30th anniversary edition. Is it coincidence that none of these Releases have sort name aliases, or is it a sign of a latent shared practice by editors?

I have not yet found a Release with a sort name supplied by an alias. Maybe at some point I will download the database, and see if a data query can find examples. Does anyone know of such Releases?

One could imagine a style guideline that says, aliases should be applied to the Release Group entity, and software which wants to find sort names for a Release should look for them in the related Release Group. Or, one could imagine a different guideline which says, aliases should be applied to the Release entity and Release Group entity in parallel. Which would we prefer?

Also, I would like to improve the Style/Aliases guideline to clarify how it applies to Releases and Release Groups, once I have clarity on what it should say.

Once we have a style guideline, it might be helpful to make a bot which patrolled the Releases and Release Groups, looking for sort name aliases in one entity which should be copied or migrated to a related entity. And once we have data, it would helpful to add a Picard variable with the Release’s sort name. But first, we have to know the right place to find a Release’s sort name.

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I’d ask the question the other way. Do you have a media player that uses these Release sort orders?

With a large list of artists it makes sense to list “Pixies, The” under “P”. Does it matter as much under Releases? Do you list all your albums in alphabetical order?

Really it is the media players that should make this choice. Then it would be down to someone asking Picard to add them to a tag so the media player can list it. It has never been requested, so it is not there.

As to Releases and Aliases… I don’t think any one bothers. I know I never have added them. But that is mainly as I never use them in my media player.

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That is a relevant question, but not, I think, the most important question. It is valuable to improve the data in the database just because it is true facts about recorded music. The behaviour of media players and taggers may provide motivation for editors to contribute data, but it is not a reason to distort the design of the database.

Sort of. Most of my music is European art music (“classical" music), so I have a lot of Releases under names like Mozart, Bach, and Verdi. It helps a bit if the Releases are sorted in alphabetical order.

Also, I want to be able to catalogue my albums in multiple ways: by first Album Artist, by complete Album Artist, by Release name, by composer, etc. etc. If the database has good data, that lets me produce better catalogues.

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I think what I meant is people need a reason to do something. The database has added an artist sort order because Picard adds it to tags of tracks as media players use it to sort the artists in media players.

As there has been no call for it in Media players for sorting Releases, it just hasn’t happened.

I see the logic of what you are asking, but it needs people to put in the effort. And to put in an effort people need a reason.

I went to look at my albums when you posted this. And see not a single tag in there for Release Sort Order.

It is a chicken and egg thing. Something needs to come first.

It is easy to apply this to artists, harder to apply it to releases.

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Agreed. But let’s be clear about the “something” this thread is asking for. It is to clarify a style policy:

…should sort names be provided via aliases of Release entities, or of the corresponding Release Group entities, or both?

The status quo is that the style guidelines imply that editors can apply sort name aliases to Releases and/or Release Groups haphazardly. Maybe the consensus is that sort name aliases are discouraged. Maybe the consensus is that I can just go ahead and add what seems right to me.

I am not proposing launching a massive campaign of many editors to add sort name aliases to every Release.

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The system is set for you to do this. As that old saying goes “build it an it will come”. Someone has to start, So pick some releases and start applying aliases.

Personally I’d focus on the Release Groups as something like Dark Side of the Moon has 138 releases to work on…

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My “be bold and edit” next step would be to add sort name aliases to Release entities for physical Releases as I add them to my collection. That way the work actually benefits my own cataloguing directly.

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FWIW Picard does support sort fields for both release and track title, and tagging formats often have a specific field for it. But by default Picard doesn’t fill them as they are not supported on MB. So if there would be support added we could easily update Picard.

Sort fields are generally not that well supported by players, but if it is it would be nice to have.

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whoever sorts their albums by title is a psychopat.

there is only one correct sorting order and that is name of artist > year of release.

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Sorting VA albums by release title rather than year makes a lot of sense to me, or for broad categories such as musical theatre or soundtracks, where I will remember what the release is called but necessarily the year of release or who wrote the book or music.

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Indeed, it would be insane to set the same aliases in every releases.
The release group aliases are enough.
Release aliases could be used if this or that edition has a specific title, maybe.

The first one, of course! :slight_smile:

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Whoever sorts their albums by metadata printed on the cover is afraid of hard work. The only rigorous way to sort albums is by Release MBID number.

What, you don’t have all your MBID’s memorised? :winking_face_with_tongue:

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IMO, the proper ordering for release collections is, like on my shelves, by artist then by original release date. :sweat_smile:

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Obviously needs to be ordered based on the total playing time of the Release. :laughing: Boxsets on left, to singles on the right. If I have 43 mins to fill, I need to know which album to put on.

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I see no reason not to add the aliases to both levels if you can be bothered; not all releases in a release group will always have the same name (and sort name) as the RG itself. That said, any alias is better than no aliases and just adding it to the RG seems pretty good if your release has the same title anyway.

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BUT, it’s still a pity that the release search does not profit from the release group aliases (SEARCH-601). :wink:

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Looks at “Dark Side of the Moon, The” Release Group. Sees 138 Releases. Realises that is a good idea as it may actually help search find “Dark Side of the Moon” by Pink Floyd when doing a release search…

Someone will need to write a script…

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Having given this matter some thought, I think that this take, “the release group aliases are enough”, is too simple. What if the Release Title does not match the Release Group title?

For example, compare release/556e8d5 “狂気” and release/a773d9e “Dark Side of the Moon” to their RG, release-group/f5093c0 . The Release titles differ from the Release Group title and from each other. How would aliases for the Release Group be applied to these Releases? What is the exact algorithm?

Thinking about it, this is fundamentally a data design problem. Each Release Group and each Release has its own separate Title string and their own collection of Aliases, so there will inevitably be duplication and inconsistency. Imagine if a collection of Aliases could be shared by Releases and their Release Group, like Recordings can be shared between Releases. Then adding one sortname entry, or one translation of a name, to the Alias group would make it available to all the Releases and to the Release Group at once.

But given that we have the data design that we have, it will not be simple to extend MusicBrainz clients (e.g. Picard, my code) to fill in its gaps. So, I am coming to the conclusion that the Release Sortname style guidelines should be based on the data design and the software which we have now.

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I gathered some data, using queries on my copy of the MusicBrainz database. I counted how many Release groups had only 1 Release, how many had 2 Releases, and so on up to the one Release Group with the highest number of Releases: 294 of them!

Of the 3,906,042 Release Groups I counted, 3,314,408 (84.9%) had just one Release each. A further 397,060 (10.17%) had just two Releases each. The numbers plummet from there.

# Releases/RG # Release Groups % of Release Groups Cumulative %
1 3,314,408 84.85% 84.85%
2 397,060 10.17% 95.02%
3 101,725 2.60% 97.62%
4 39,302 1.01% 98.63%
5 18,793 0.48% 99.11%
6 .. 210 (108 rows) 34,754 0.89% 100.00%
294 1 0.00% 100.00%

The vast majority of Release Groups have just one Release, so it is just as easy to put the Aliases on that one Release as on the Release Group.

Based on this data, I plan to start adding my Release sort names as Release aliases, and not worry about the Release Group. If I write a Style proposal about Release sortnames, right now I think it should say the same thing.

An improvement to these statistics would be to count the Release Groups and Releases which have the same Name, and that Name is one where the Sortname would be different in that language. That is, for an English-language Release the Name starts with "The ", "A ", "An ", etc.; for a German-language Release the Name starts with "Die ", "Der ", or "Das "; or whatever the rule may be.

A good place for finding the first set of language-specific rules is in the behaviour of the Sortname button in the MusicBrainz Alias editing UI.

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With your stats, an equal question is - what percentage look like they actually need a sort order added? How many of your releases start with The, A, An, etc?

The actual mission to create sort orders should be heavily focused on just those smaller percentage of release that need it. It would make the task much more achievable. Any algorithm that needs to use sort order just takes a blank sort order as a hint to fall back on the original title.

To me, I’d see the logic of “Use Release Sort”, if blank “Use Release Group Sort”, if blank “Use Release Title”

A release like “The Dark Side of the Moon” is a good example of somewhere it really makes sense to make sure the Release Group is populated as you are less likely to find someone who will add sort order to all 138 Releases.

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