Split releases as secondary type

MusicBrainz
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Hello!

The recent addition of field recordings as secondary release-group type got me thinking about another potential type, splits (sorry if there’s a topic for this already, i couldn’t find it)

For those who don’t know, a split is a type of collaborative release which feature tracks by most of the time 2-4 (but sometimes more) artists. The release is often distributed equally between artists (same amount of tracks and/or same amount of time), sometimes there are a few tracks credited to both artists
Artist credits are usually like “Artist 1 / Artist 2” which is also our current style guideline, but “&”, “and”, “vs” and “x” are also frequently used, example.
While this type is different from compilations, Hannah Montana 2 / Meet Miley Cyrus could be both? And releases like Mega Split with 27 artists almost feel like compilations, but i guess that’s artist intent like with the difference between EP’s and albums.

For more examples there’s the MusicBrainz / bandcamp tag and my split series collection (which i’ll be adding releases to once this type gets added (or confirmed won’t))

I’d like to hear other people’s opinions on this!
thanks :slight_smile:

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that could be a good secondary type~

for the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana example, I wonder if “box set” might be a better term for that, and also include examples such as:

https://musicbrainz.org/release/62d38d56-629d-48ba-8b97-b6983e318501

all three include other releases whole (plus your example I mentioned), so I feel that is different enough from a split. I can start a new topic/style ticket for this idea tho~

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You’re right, “box set” describes this more accurately!
So that means there are 3 different types of compilations right now (various artists, single artist best/selected works, box sets) using the same secondary type?
Box sets feel different enough imo to consider as a new type too like you said

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I have a pretty crazy amount (relative to the rest of my collection) of 7" splits, which is a very popular format for punk/grind/etc. When I have digital rips of these I manually append [split] to the folder name, so this would be a useful piece of information for Picard and other tools to pull.

What I’m not sure is useful is breaking up how the releases are viewed in an artist discography, even more than they already are. I like seeing splits in with the rest of the albums and eps, it’s nice to see how they sit chronologically with the rest of the releases. Some discographies are going to start looking pretty messy (example)

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A split doesn’t seem like a significantly different sort of album to me in the way a live album or a spokenword album or whatever is, isn’t it just “same as any other but with more than one artist”? :slight_smile: So yeah, I agree with @aerozol that splitting the discography for these seems strange.

This could possibly be made into an attribute of the release group or the release once we have those available elsewhere than on works, maybe? Or maybe that seems silly too, not sure! :slight_smile:

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I’d not have a secondary type for this for the reasons mentioned above.

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Well a split album is obvious from its artist credits, I don’t see why we need to redundantly tell it again with another means.

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I personally agree, but clearly if people add [split] when tagging they probably feel it’s not obvious enough? :slight_smile:

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Maybe a Picard script could detect more than 1 artist and the presence of slash join phrase then add [split] in that case…

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It’s pretty clear when it’s a split when viewing something on MB, or when you’re looking at the album - I just treat the local files differently because the usual Artist > Album structure doesn’t work well with lots of these.

So they go in their own splits folder, with a kind of complicated naming/filing system to try have it searchable, and with correct cover art for each side, and so on.

I don’t know if MB will be able to solve this problem (though an attribute definitely can’t hurt imo, if/when that happens)

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That’s a good point I hadn’t really thought about! I agree that adding it now would do more harm than good for the user experience

Thanks but I don’t really understand why or what this means, how would this be any different from secondary types (or release statuses)?

After reading this i wanted to make one, but there are some non-split releases with 2 artists and a /, & or x join phrase (where all tracks are also collaborative, for example Drone+Unease, The First Sound of The Future Past and Ugly Witchery)
I thought about somehow calculating howmany tracks/howmuch time every album artist has in that album (only including songs with 1 artist) but ended up finding a variable (%_multiartist%) which is set true if not all the tracks have the same credited artists, which is not perfect but way easier/shorter and still covers a lot of cases

$if($gt(%_artists_album_all_count%,1),
	$if(%_multiartist%,_splits,_other-multi-artist)/%albumartist% - ,
	$if($eq(%albumartist%,Various Artists),_compilations/,%albumartist%/))%album%/
$num(%tracknumber%,2). %artist% - %title%

This script uses the additional artist variables plugin and creates 3 sub-folders in the music folder, _compilations, _splits and _other-multi-artist

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we currently only have entity attributes for works, and some of the attributes include BMI ID, key (and other culture’s equivalents), and so on. you can see them in the sidebar of Song “Winter Wrap Up” - MusicBrainz, for example

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