To which relationship(s) should I add the recording date?

MusicBrainz
1

Hello everyone.

I’ve started to add details to some classical releases I own. One area where I’m unclear is the recording date. There are several places where one can add the date range:

  1. On the “recorded at”-relationship between every recording and a place.
  2. On the “recording of”-relationship between every recording and the associated work.
  3. On the “artist”-relationship (e.g. conductor or orchestra) between every recording and a performer.
  4. On all of these relationships on the release level instead of the recording/track level. Or even on the release group level.

Here’s an example that attaches the date to all of the relationships no. 1 to 3:
Goldberg Variations

Duplicating the same data in several relationships seems bad practice to me. I find option 1, adding the date on the “recorded at”-relationship, the most appealing.

But after looking around a little in the database and this forum, it seems that adding the date to several relationships is the favorite approach. The post The Classical Editor Toolbox recommends a script to propagate the date to other relationships.

So, where should the date go? Would be grateful for any pointers or recommendations.

2

The thing is, while your examples 99.9% or so of the time will all relate to the same date/date range, that’s not necessarily going to be the case and the semantics are slightly different.

An example: A track can have been recorded in multiple studios/locations, it has its vocals recorded one place and instruments another. The instrumentals were recorded in studio A on 2019-01-07 and vocals in studio B on 2019-01-08. That’d be a Recording-Work relationship with the date range 2019-01-{07–08}, but two separate “recorded at” relationships with different dates and also different dates for the artist performance relationships.

You can’t infer the date of either the vocal or instrumental recording from any of the other relationships with time data, hence why it needs to be added to all of them.

5 Likes
3

Thank you for the explanation. Then I’ll give that script a try and copy the date to all appropriate relationships.