The "When is it a soundtrack / when is it classical?" question

[ijabz]

@CallerNo6

But is the track artist field being used inconsistently? It depends on what you think the correct usage is. One interpretation (as @Hawke said) is: the track artist field says nothing about an artist’s role on the track. It merely indicates that this is the artist credited for the track.

What does it mean to be “credited for a track”? Unfortunately, this seems to be a matter of interpretation. Track lists in the wild are not written to be machine-parsed.

Lets take this in stages

1. Pop/Rock Recording Artist Credit/Track Artist Credit
   Apart from the misused standalone recordings recordings exist as part of at least one release and the recording credit is actually the track artist credit of the release that the recording was originally added to.
   So if the recording is part of only one release there is no difference between recording artist credit and track artist credit.
   Track artist credit is only different when the exact same recording is on a different release but credited slightly different.
   Often there is no difference between the release artist credit for the release and the track artist credit/recording artist credit for all tracks on the release.

2. Classical
   I dont see why we cant adhere to the same logic.

So when a a new release is added with new recordings there would be no difference between the recording artist credit and track artist credit for those recordings.
There seems to be this idea that tracks are not credited on Classical music releases but when I look at my collection I’m not seeing this, they don’t neccessarily credit each track seperately if ther eis no difference but differnces a re recorded.

Example 1
A release with one concerto on each side, both concerto are by the same composer, both performed by the same orchestra and with the same conductor, no soloists, each consisting of three movements.
Then the release artist credit/track artist credit/recording artist credit would likley be the same.

Example 2
A release with one concerto on each side,each concerto by a different composer, both performed by the same orchestra and with the same conductor, no soloists, each consisting of three movements.
Then the release artist credit would have both composers, orchestra and conductor.
Tracks on side 1 would have one composer,. orchestra, conductor as track artist credit/recording artist credit
Tracks on side 2 would have one composer,. orchestra, conductor as track artist credit/recording artist credit

Example 3
A release with one concerto on each side,each concerto by a different composer, both performed by the same orchestra and with the same conductor, each consisting of three movements, Soloist is credited on track 1 of both
concertos.
Then the release artist credit would have both composers, orchestra and conductor, possible soloist depends on what is written on cover.
Tracks 1 on side 1 would have soloist, one composer, orchestra, conductor as track artist credit/recording artist credit
Tracks 2,3 on side 1 would have one composer, orchestra, conductor as track artist credit/recording artist credit
Tracks 1 on side 2 would have soloist,one composer, orchestra, conductor as track artist credit/recording artist credit
Tracks 2,3 on side 2 would have one composer, orchestra, conductor

Example 4
Another release containing recordings 1,2,3 the same as example 4, but this time the soloist is credited by name using a different script language so the track artist credit for track 1 would differ from the recording artist credit for the recording

Then ideally relationships should be added for composer, orchestra, solists as required. But its worth noting that relationship only let you link an entity to an entity you cannot capture any difference in the way the name is written on the sleeve, that is why it is important to try and capture that in the recording artist credit.

With the solution I propose you capture the relevant track specific detail as written on the sleeve. And in the majority of cases track artist credit and recording artist credit would be the same so editing is easier because you just add them once, and it wouldn’t be so critical for applications to have to guess what guidelines were being used to interpret the data as the relationship between recording artist credit and track artist credit would be the same for all releases.

Applications that needed to better support Classical could also construct a ‘Track artist’ based on relationships (although they are not always added)

The difference between Classical and Pop/Rock would simply be that for Pop/Rock the performer is normally credited, and is often also the composer. Where as with Classical the composer/conductor/orchestra/soloist are all of interest.

Regarding your Picard mappings I assume picard writes the same value for all formats and I expect this would be the track artist credit.

[reosarevok]

I’ll start by saying I don’t care much whether we add a CSG flag or not, but:

@ijabz

But as I keep saying, (and keep getting ignored in replies) the issue for me is the way we use the trackartist field in a completely different way for some releases and we dont even indicate which releases we do this for.

We use the track artist field for who is credited. We have a more specific guideline on who to pick (the composer) for classical music, but that’s just picking a subset of who is credited. You keep claiming the two things are somehow completely different, when they are not (and you’ve been told they’re not before) so I imagine most people just chose to stop answering to that claim in every post, especially when you just go into hyperbole like “Its analogous to using the Barcode field to store the Vinyl colour for coloured vinyl for releases that don’t have a barcode”.

If anything, it’s recording credits which deviate from the norm more for classical (since they don’t just copy release credits). But that’s useful in many ways, so it makes sense to keep it IMO.

The reason CSG works as it is is because that’s what the community decided at the time. Some people might have picked because of their tagging preferences, others because of their editing preferences. I don’t tag much at all, but right now display/UI wise I think classical is in a very good place (and it’s a pretty decent one for editing too as long as you use a couple extra scripts on top of MB).

Performers on recording make sense because of what a recording is and because of how they’re linked to works. Composers on track just give the most important bit of info (“which track is this”) while all the more detailed info on both performance and composition is visible as relationships under it. They also make the VA releases appear under the composers, as they should - “this release includes a work by Composer X” is more likely to be a reason to look for a release than “this release includes some tracks played by Quartet Y”, except for particularly dedicated fans of Quartet Y.

Other than that, the arguments @ListMyCDs.com gave about new and/or “lazy” users are pretty on point and anything that makes adding classical releases even slower and more annoying for a new user is problematic. I’m happy to add twenty new performers for each release, but many users would probably much rather stop adding data to MB. And we’d much rather have the release in with some useful data than no release at all.

@ijabz

Tracks 1 on side 2 would have soloist,one composer, orchestra, conductor as track artist credit/recording artist credit

We could cram absolutely everyone into the track artist fields (which seems to be what you’re asking for?) but that would be both unwieldy to use and horribly ugly. If for some reason you really want to have everyone in the artist credit, simply make your tagger add everyone there. It should be fairly trivial.

Edit because this bit just felt so funny to me:

@ijabz

And I’ve spoken to serious classical music enthusiasts and they want to see performers in the track artist field so they can more easily differentiate between different performances of the same work

Why would any serious classical music enthusiast ever use any software, be it tagger or player, that doesn’t use the composer and performer tags properly? Putting everything into a field and hoping for the best definitely sounds like pretty much the opposite of serious to me.

[reosarevok]

And @ijabz: In general, I’d suggest if all you really need for your software is a CSG flag, posting a request for that and only that is much more likely to lead to an improvement to the situation for you than writing twenty long posts about how we’re doing everything wrong and we don’t understand it.

[ijabz]

@reosarevok

And @ijabz: In general, I’d suggest if all you really need for your software is a CSG flag, posting a request for that and only that is much more likely to lead to an improvement to the situation for you than writing twenty long posts about how we’re doing everything wrong and we don’t understand it.

When most of the posters on this topic didnt seem to understand that using a different set of guidelines for different releases without identifying which guidelines they were using was a problem I had to go into alot more detailed then I origjnally meant to.I post in response to questions an issues raised by others. I also post to reiterate certain points that the same old faces at Musicbrainz just ignore time and time again as you have mostly done.

[CallerNo6]

Have I mentioned lately how much I like tags?

Would using a ‘CSG’ tag work as a flag? At least as an interim/prototype solution?

addendum: hmm, using a tag might be complicated by MBS-7034, “ws/2 tag query asks for authentication”. It also might be dumb, but that determination is above my pay-grade.

[reosarevok]

@ijabz

I also post to reiterate certain points that the same old faces at Musicbrainz just ignore time and time again as you have mostly done.

And on we go. Disagreeing with you is not the same as ignoring you. And repeating the same points again and again in hopes someone gives up and tells you you’re right won’t make people stop disagreeing (it might, as happened a couple times in the past, like with CAA stuff, make people decide they’d rather put up with things being your way than getting more anxious about you arguing with them continuously, which was quite infuriating to see back then and I’m not going to let happen in the part of MB I’m in charge of).

On the other hand, repeating the same points again and again will, of course, mean the points get ignored because there’s no reason to talk about them further. Plus, yeah, I might have missed some points, because there are eighty messages in this thread and half of them are yours, long and saying basically the same, so I skimmed some of them. I think that’s an understandable reaction.

I can’t find a ticket for the classical flag thing. Is there one? If not I’d suggest you add one. That’s a development / technical decision, there’s no need to even come to the forum with it, much less to go off on a tangent about CSG itself (and if you think something specific needs changing in the guidelines, add a STYLE ticket and I’ll put it up for discussion in the proper way and following the proper procedure).

The flag seems to be also something Picard people would be interested in, anyway, so while it might take a while to be added (because the main concerns right now are with Docker and moving to the new hosts, and because it’s probably a schema change), I doubt there’s anyone actively opposed to the flag - at most they might be like “meh not sure what’s the point”, and given that’s how many of us feel about stuff like script and packaging and we keep setting them, I’d expect people would set it anyway if it got added.

I’m closing this because the discussion is clearly going nowhere. Add the ticket, and I’ll happily vote for it (and quickly reopen this to post the ticket link so other people who are interested can do the same).

[reosarevok]

Ticket: [MBS-9020] Have a way for an editor to indicate when a release is using the Classical Style Guidelines - MetaBrainz JIRA