Hi, I am wondering what is the status of standalone recording tracks who have since their release appeared on an official release.
There has been, for example, 3 tracks released independantly from one another by band Anathema http://musicbrainz.org/artist/20aa23e3-3532-42ca-acf6-e8c2e9df2688 on their website in 2006, while they had no label. One of them is A Simple Mistake https://musicbrainz.org/recording/4ec0120a-cc8b-4cb4-8837-c46fcdcfa089 and as you can see, it has since then appeared on enhanced edition of their 2010 album. However, I feel that information is currently missing from that page as it makes no mention of the 2006 original date, neither of the fact that the original demo was 8:37 (and even if the last 20 seconds or so were silence, I think it’s still relevant). Is there anything that could be done about that? Does it deserve more than just a short comment stating that the track was first recorded in 2006?
Why not add these as digital media single releases?
Then you can add all the relevant information, eg the track length, the date and [no label]
That sounds like a good idea. I’ll wait for some time to see if other people have things to say, but I may do that.
I’m actually asking because I’m pretty much a beginner at editing, so I wanted to know if there were a general consensus on the question (after all, these tracks were added back in 2006 to the database and later edited into the current state of the database, so I wondered what to do or not do).
Did you have a look at the discussion in the recording edit history? (right at the bottom)
Looks like @Midness did add the track as part of a release back in 2006, which was later removed, possibly by @Shepard who thought a release with this track on it was imminent (I guess it didn’t happen).
If you would like to get those editors attention you can leave a note on that original edit and they’ll both get an email.
However I would say that your safe to go ahead and add the release, especially if you have the release information handy. People can always vote and leave edit notes/remove it again 
Yeah I did see that, and that’s actually the part that questions me. A release with that track actually did happen (though with a different track length), but did that mean the original standalone recording release had to be removed?
Anyway thanks for your explanations, they’ll be useful when I decide to move on with the edits.
In my opinion not at all.
The first date that the track was available, and how it was made available, is interesting information that we can store.