You’re in a community of people who spend thousands of hours adding music data minutae… don’t worry about it
Re. how you’d like to title releases to sit in your own collection, or merge them into new releases, that has to take a back seat in the community database, where it’s more important that everyone adds data consistently/predictably. For instance putting the event name in the title might not suit these releases.
However as IvanDobsky has said, this DB is very capable of handling most of the data you can throw at it, and then a lot of that can be used in your tagging setup. The mixture of releases, release groups, collections, and events (that you can link releases + recordings to) means that you can probably go as deep as you would like. Your knowledge sounds invaluable so I’d say the quickest way is to just jump in with a Discogs import script and add a couple of releases! Stuff like bootlegs of bootlegs with different details sounds like one of those things that’s super satisfying to disentangle and get all tidy on MB!!
The Discogs examples are both the official release (which is considered unofficial, won’t have had barcodes) plus some bootlegs of those not released by Helter Skelter. I think the different 8-packs and 12-packs, also 4-packs and double packs released by Helter over their years in business were sometimes straight recordings of one arena, ie. the Technodrome, but other times collections of all genre sets between two main arenas. This event used to have drum & bass in arena 1, the Sanctuary, while happy hardcore was being played in Arena 2, Rollers, but then switch genres every hour, but I’ve been reassembling all the different sets and using the track tags to indicate which hour of which arena rather than which side of tape or disc. This is where rules get complicated for MB’s database and mine as the tapes or discs were often compiled in the order of most notable artists first rather than the warm-up acts.
I have been meaning to learn scripting but so far have just been probably doing everything far more manually than is healthy so I will have to take directions, if anybody can point me to the right instructions. Thanks again.
An MB release is very specific in what it is: A music release/package in the exact way it and the contents were released. There’s not much wiggle room for ‘fan improvement’ to a release unfortunately (like rearranging the track order) - though if you released your edits as bootlegs you might be able to add those *
But the starting point is to add the existing as-is releases to MB anyway, maybe add an event and see how linking them to recordings and releases goes. Once you’ve done a bit you’ll get an idea of what data you can pull for scripting and how you might want to do it.
*If it’s widespread enough. This would be a good example of how MB represents releases quite specifically - your bootleg release date would be 2021. Then you’d have to set Picard to pull the original recording date or script something to take another value.
MB guidlelines are fairly strict as they aim to bring such a wide area of media types together. They will be different to your current layout. And much of your info will end up in Annotations of the Release and Release Groups. But the core Releases - the Casettes, CDs, the MP3s - these will have a good structured home here. And your added data will fit along side for other people to extract and expand upon.
I had that same weird error the other day. Can’t remember what I did. Have you been deleting or shuffling Mediums? Or maybe try shuffling a Medium up and down the list?
I know it didn’t make sense at the time, but I managed to ignore it some how or other.
I’m literally messing with as little as possible to see how far I can get with the least effort because it will still take years just to get the info I do know up, let alone all the other details most people can cope without for these type release groups… If I do have to tick ‘I don’t know the tracklist’ for every single file, this is already a daunting task TBH
I think this was released as a ZIP and there are no track numbers or indication of the order the sets and often the event flyer sets times change at the last minute at these kinda parties but you can see that MB doesn’t want to take the data from the Contributing Artist field and instead takes it from the Album Artist (all except the last file). Am I missing something? Thanks!
Maybe try massaging the data a bit in notepad++ or MP3tag. Could be that extra chars are confusing it. Can’t tell due to not being able to see the full text.
Notepad++ is a better text editor for Windows. If you run a Windows VM on that Apple, it is worth checking. It has some pretty decent text manipulation tools over and above the average text editor.
Otherwise I’d be using MP3tag to massage the tags a bit before Picard gets at them.
Paste some of the text you’re getting from this duff album. maybe a pattern with stand out. Something is being misread by the text parser.
You need to “think like the plugin”. If you do a COPY CLUSTER TO CLIPBOARD and paste that in a post it may be easier to guess where it is making an error in the parsing.
I am guessing the missing track numbers won’t help. (Something MP3TAG is great at doing a quick fix on with that 1/2 button on the toolbar)
Not sure what’s happening - have you played with the track parser on the Edit > Tracklist page @DerekFerric? It can also automate filling out the tracklist for you, it’s great.
Then you can see exactly what’s being copied in, and change your text/export code to match. That sounds more complicated than it is, it really is worth a quick look
btw my offer to run you through any questions you have (maybe on Twitch?) still stands if you have any other that remain unanswered/confusing, PM me any time.
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