Yes, maybe this guideline was written in a time when we could not put dates on recording (performance) relationships?
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One place is when you go to a forum where they are publishing raw bootleg from “last night’s gig”. As it has not made its way onto a published CD it just gains a generic date & location name. Having the ability to add a date to the front of a bootleg makes sorting them out so much easier. Especially as we are usually not allowed to add a release date to bootlegs.
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Even then, there’s sometimes something in the metadata of the file(s), or even just the filename itself could be a title, if its an archive or a single audio file of the whole show, rather than a bunch of individual tracks. I have a live recording by Zeal & Ardor that the band put on Dropbox for 24 hours after the show: I don’t remember now exactly, but it’s possible the metadata was blank, but the file named something like “Z&A Glasgow 2022.mp3”. So again I wouldn’t be sure anymore what the current guidance wants, if I was dealing with an instance of a bootleg distributed through forums in a similar way.
For bootlegs with actual titles, just follow the standard titles guideline.
For untitled bootlegs, use its date and location information, in the form “YYYY-MM-DD: Venue, City, State/Province, Country”.
Maybe it’s just me but…
The only way these two sentences make sense is if actual title is the inverse of untitled.
The edit referenced here is a physical CD, with a cover, with a title.
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My understanding of this is that the idea was that the bootleg style should be used unless something you would normally call a title (such as the “Heart of the Rising Sun” Yes bootleg) exists - and that the intention was that anything that just had a “title” made of a bunch of performance info would use the bootleg style.
That said, I don’t edit bootlegs myself, and if a fair amount of people who do think the style should be a last resort rather than a default, that’s certainly a discussion worth having.
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and the title is clear…The edit is incorrect.
Personally, a no vote to using torrent names and downloaded file tags to replace the bootleg style.
U2 - Zoo TV Japan :: 1993-12-09 / 1993-12-10 :: EVSD 1755/1756/1757/1758
Is not my idea of a useful release title.
Also I don’t believe what a random uploader (or more likely, re-uploader) typed into the title field is any more ‘canon’ than a title I could come up with.
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Been away for a while, but in case it is useful in working out how the guidance might be rephrased: I think I subconsciously closed the gap between these two cases by replacing “untitled” by the inverse of “with [an] actual title”. (This gives you something closer to what is written here.) I guess this is in part because of the sentence order, and partly because of the widespread use of the standard format on the site already, suggesting (perhaps wrongly, since they could have been working under an older version of the style guide) that most users were interpreting this guidance the same way I did.
My digging into the editing history of that style page gave me the same impression as @reosarevok, i.e. that the intention was probably that the bootleg style was the default, to be used in most cases (and that’s why the words “actual” and “proper” ended up appearing). But as I have said already, I don’t have any real opinion on what gets decided about this going forward, only that the ambiguity in the style guide should be reduced.
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