Today I learned that the style guide for ETI says that this should be kept in the title field for releases. I am used to this for tracks and recordings, but didn’t previously realise that it applied to releases as well, because this info so often ends up in the disambiguation field. (Indeed, I have made a number of edits moving it there for consistency, and this is the first time one has been queried, as far as I remember.)
Is this style guideline still reflecting what people actually want? Personally, I’d rather this information go to disambiguation for releases, but maybe I’m in a minority. (Recordings are a little more complicated because there will be some grey areas around remixes, although you already often see things like “5.1 mix” or “instrumental” put in the disambiguation comment.)
Physical Media - if it is written on the cover, it stays in the title.
I’m with you that I’d likely just tuck it in the disambig. “Remastering” is not really a MB thing. But then I like to own music and not stream it so I’m not really the right person for a response.
And why is that example release a (2014 remaster) which was released in 2013? Digital media is a puzzling world at times…
And I think, that’s where it belongs. At release level, the disambiguation is already helpful. It clearly makes sense to keep an ETI for distinguishing tracks, but in the above example, there is nothing to distinguish (there are no ETIs and that’s correct).
For recordings, a “remastered” information is already impossible as ETI because remastered versions are no separate recordings.
On Deezer and Spotify this ETI is appended to all tracks and the title, but I would keep the title as on “cover” and there’s nothing about a remaster.
If ETI is on the cover art, it is added to the release title as official ETI between parenthesis. If it’s only on promo material or digital names, but not on the cover art, it goes as disambiguation. Not sure why so many always put it in disambiguation, but according to guidelines, this is incorrect.
Just to mention it since it’s related and doesn’t seem widely known, soundtrack-related text like “Original Motion Picture Score” and “Music from the Motion Picture” is not ETI and should almost always be entered as a subtitle, separated from the main release name using a colon.
Consider text such as “Original Motion Picture Score” or “Music from the Motion Picture” as release subtitles.
The only exception that I can think of is if the cover art actually includes the text in parentheses, but I don’t think I’ve seen that done often. Most streaming platforms seem to put “Original Soundtrack”-type text in parentheses regardless of what the cover says, so that’s what often ends up in MusicBrainz too. :-/
It seems then like there’s something of a consensus for treating ETI-like text in the titles of digital releases as “unofficial”, and putting it in disambigutation, unless it actually appears on the cover art. That sounds reasonable to me, and I think I can even convince myself it is consistent with the style guide as currently written.
