[quote=“Hawke, post:19, topic:212”]
“How shall we display the name of the show that the work comes from?”[/quote]
An extra line in title style would suffice. It’s just extra title information.
As in a release title? That goes in the same place.
The bit about the release artist in the current soundtrack style guide reads like a copy-paste of the style for classical releases. Except that that would only apply to classical soundtracks. Would anyone credit anyone but Vangelis for a soundtrack by Vangelis?
Another case which could just as well happen on a non-soundtrack release. If a guideline is needed for this, wouldn’t it be more fitting in a general guideline instead of one specific for soundtracks?
You’re right that it doesn’t strictly need to be in a dedicated soundtrack style, but regardless: those are the questions answered by the soundtrack style guide.
If you think that, you might want to re-read the works section of Soundtrack Style.
I read past the word “works” and thought about track titles, my bad.
So I just read the paragraph about works in the soundtrack style guideline. It’s rather horrific in itself isn’t it? (I know we’re straying rather far off topic). Why abuse the disambiguation comment like that? Take The Imperial March for example. The disambiguation is stupid long, but the alternative title (Darth Vader’s Theme) could be an alias, just like “The Empire Strikes Back: Imperial March” already is. There is also already a link to the work for the entire soundtrack, so there really is no need for all that silliness in the comment.
It’s not abuse when you consider the basis for it: Disambiguations like that are entirely appropriate for titles like “Main Titles” and “End Credits” (End credits for which movie, exactly?) also “Theme” and a few others are extremely common. Since we can never know when some other movie is going to have a cue called “Suspense” or something generic like that, it makes sense to generalize this to always putting it in the disambiguation.
The Imperial March specifically is kind of excessive because of the long movie title, but I think the principle is sound regardless of the existence of a few movies with long titles.
If you’re trying to standardize information, you’re going to come across things like that often.
But I think it’s better to have things look janky to the human eye from time to time rather than to be inconsistent.
Some of my albums on my computer are listed as (1998) EP [EP], which looks stupid, but at least it’s consistent, which I think is more the MB way in general
Consistent in an extreme way is anti-art. Music is art, MB should let art live.
What I mean is that MB provides many things (AC, relationships, types, etc.) to allow prominent fields like track names and artists, release names and artists to be faithful to any artistic and inconsistent fantasy.
I agree that MB should let art live. The use of the concept “artist intent” to justify our actions as cataloguers is one existing area that MB is anti-art.
All the same time I think that cataloging is also an art and that if we want to create metadata using consistent guidelines then, as long as we take responsibility for our artistic choices and make those choices explicit to users, we can morally exercise our creative feedom.
I think you’re mis-interpreting what I’m saying to suit your own agenda tbh
How would an artist have input on what disambiguation we use? Or how I sort my folders?
In principle I of course agree with you, hopefully we get support for alternate tracklistings soon so we can put that whole (or most of…) the sorry mess behind us
I think I can understand and agree with jesus2099’s point: He’s not saying that artists should have input into things like that, but that Musicbrainz should be documenting the artist’s art rather than trying to fit it into a box that it doesn’t fit into so well.
To be honest I don’t really see what folder problem we can have…
I don’t really listen to digital media. Sorting shelves is not easy either. You have to choose if you want to do it systematically and then usually you stop because you prefer grouping that kind of music, that artist and their friends, etc.
For digital rips, isn’t the release artist and release date enough for sorting your folders?
What appears behind (title and whichever additional metadata you would like) would have no effect on the sorting, so why apply moulds on it?
Except I see where the problem is… Will I group classical music by composer or by theme or by soloist, etc. That’s really personal.
I was just reacting to a post saying things look stupid but it’s ok because we chose to make them consistent. If it looks stupid or not is not what is important to me. Does it look like the release or not is the main point.
Has MB got librarians on board?
They are trained and experienced in cataloguing. And sure they’ll push their own view of which is best but they are , or at least should be, very aware of the different approaches and the strengths, weakness, cost and benefits of the various approaches.
And any cataloging we choose to do should not impact the basic information like album name et al.
We should use the meta data for that kind of purpose, that:so all I mean.
So yes I probably mis-interpret in the first place.
Artist intent doesn’t apply to completely internal attributes like disambigs, there MB is the ‘artist’ of our system and we should try to be consistent with our ‘intent’! As always, I still agree with your overall sentiment of ‘as on packaging’, and hopefully MB supports it better soon.
Cool, and BTW outside of classical that I don’t really edit, I feel that soon is yesterday, things have improved already a lot with AC, AC on AR, unlinking track texts from recording texts, etc.
I think all the “specific types of releases” (STRs) are treated differently from a random release because they aren’t random They all come out of somewhat different traditions, and MB tries to reflect that. STR guidelines are there to override the as-on-cover data in specific contexts.
If I was entering a random release that mixed orchestral music with pop, I’d enter it using the standard guidelines. The as-on-cover credits are probably fine. It’s the context of the release that matters.
Is it possible to unambiguously determine the context of every release? No. But that’s okay.
Related to this is how do others know what guidelines you are following. For example the guidelines for classical releases are quite different to the vanilla Rock/Pop standards for (track/recording) artists but how do you know which guidelines the editor has used. I feel there should be at least be some flag saying this release is considered classical has been entered according to the classical guidelines as opposed to a classical release that has been added using the vanilla guidelines. Without such a flag how is the data to be interpreted, especially if the interpretation is being done by computer rather than human.
Off-topic for the discussion at large, but I just wanted to chip in that @Bitmap is working on this for the coming schema change release. Follow this for progress:
I haven’t read this topic (and sorry for the additional off-topic-ness), but note that that ticket is only intended to support alternative transl*ations, so if there’s an additional use case being discussed here that you think is important to support, I would comment on the ticket soon.
They all come out of somewhat different traditions, and MB tries to reflect that. STR guidelines are there to override the as-on-cover data in specific contexts.