Style guide for radio plays (story cd, "Hörspiele")

I found that there is a style guide for audiobooks here https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases/Audiobook. But I wonder, if this also includes what we call in german Hörspiele in distinction to Hörbücher (= audiobooks). I never know what is a proper english translation, radio play or story cd might be. Actually, very often people do not distinguish between audiobooks and storycds in german as well.

The difference is, that a story cd is not based on a book but is onlya produced story to listen to. Nobody is reading it out, often there isn’t even a narrator, its more a movie without video than a book with audio. You might have many different people speaking there, not only one speaking many voices/roles. And there comes the problems with the DB, how can I add a story book like that to it? I would have a stage director, a scriptwriter, then multiple actors.

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English translation is usually “radio drama” or “audio drama” (now that they’re not usually produced for radio)

I think the same guidelines mostly apply although some things are different, like audio dramas have a writer instead of author, things like that.

and should I / how could I put in the actors?

Put the actors in as “Spoken Vocal” relationships.

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I would like to add a “radio drama” now that I have on CDs, its not in the DB yet. But is there a good example of an existing radio drama where I could learn how to set stuff for this style?

For Dr Who audiobooks / Radio drama’s.

There is also lots of audio drama’s from Douglas Adams.

Put the author as the release artist then credit all the actors as spoken word vocals.
The normal “author read by actor” style does not make sense if there is an ensemble cast.

thanks, and yet one more question, it seems like it is necessary to put the spoken vocal relationship to each recording because it is not possible to link it to the release. So I started to add all the vocals (14) to the first recording (of ca 200).

Now I would need to do that with each of the 200 recordings, that seems to be a bit overloaded. Aside from that, it is not correct because not all 14 actors take part in all 200 recordings. But to figure out which character appears in which recordings would mean a lot of manual work. So, isn’t there a possibility after all to link the artists to the whole release instead of the single recordings?

At the bottom of the “Edit Relationships” page there should be a header “Release Relationships” with an “Add relationship” button-link. You can use that to add the relationships release-wide.

(Of course, as you listen through the radio play and if you feel like it, it would be appreciated if you’d add the proper relationships to the individual recordings (and once you’ve gone through them all, remove them from the release again). If you don’t feel like it though, that is obviously also perfectly fine. It is a lot of work. :slight_smile: )

You can batch add relationships to all recordings on a release.
Go to a release.
On the side click the “Edit relationships” link.
Click the checkbox at the top to select all recordings on the list.
Click the batch add relationships to release button.
Enter in the details of the relationship.
You should then be able to put an edit note and submit the changes.

sorry, I cant find the page you are referring to

Click on the highlighted link:
image

On the page that takes you to, click this link:
image

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ah ok, there is one more editing page. Gee, the page has really some overview faults. Why is there no possibility to add relationships on the normal release editing page?

I think the idea is that otherwise the basic process would be even longer and more confusing and people would just give up halfway. That said, we should have some sort of “I want to add relationships (performers, writers, etc.) to the release after submitting the edit” checkbox or something.

Edit: another issue is that in some cases there is no actual way to add the relationships until the release edit passes. For example, if you have an open edit changing the assigned recordings on a release, any new recordings won’t be created until the edit is accepted.

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