What's the consensus on demoscene musicdisks?

[Victini]

I’ve noticed some musicdisks from the demoscene have been added onto MusicBrainz, such as Chipdisk #1 by Razor 1911 which seems to have been based on the Discogs listing. There are some musicdisks I want to consider adding to MusicBrainz, such as Estrayk’s/PARADOX’s The Her Collection but I want to get the consensus on it before I go and add it. Would it be considered a valid addition to MusicBrainz, and if so, what things do I need to look out for when adding them?

From the top of my head, the issues with this one is who should get the release artist credit: Estrayk, the artist involved in the collection, or PARADOX, the demogroup who released it? And while tracker music does have a start and finish to our ears, it tends to loop rather than finish; should I add times for the recordings or not? There’s also the issue of how titles should be handled on this specific release - the musicdisk EXE shows a generic “The HER Song Number 1” while on the modules they might have something like “trainer2” instead. Which title takes priority here?

[derat]

That very much seems like a valid addition to MB! There’s some earlier discussion about demoscene releases here:

Standalone recordings vs. compilation releases

My music collection includes various demoscene or demoscene-adjacent songs that I originally downloaded from artists’ websites or from online archives like files.scene.org or modarchive.org. Many of these seem like standalone recordings to me: the docs specifically call out Internet-only releases (although many of these songs were created before the mainstream adoption of the web, and were instead distributed via BBSes). I finally got around to tagging these songs with Picard and adding standal…

I’d probably credit the release to PARADOX (or Paradox, not sure which is more commonly used) since the filenames, program, and file_id.diz all seem to do that. I’d credit the tracks and recordings to Estrayk, though.

I’d use the duration up to the point where the whole song loops, if you’re able to get that (I typically use ffmpeg -i in.mod -q:a 2 out.mp3 </dev/null on Linux to convert to MP3, and it seems to handle this reasonably).

Personally, I usually use the most-descriptive song titles I can get (e.g. checking the modules’ instrument names to see if the composer put something there). The most-correct thing may be to use the generic names in the tracklist and the actual titles on the recordings, but that’s more work.

[Victini]

Thanks for the input! This all helps, especially as I do use Linux myself (I use EndeavourOS btw), so I can grab the lengths there just fine. I’ll go add The HER Collection later.

BTW, I added that Nest HQ comp - whoops. Picard does need to make grabbing standalone recordings easier…