When should a stylized artist name be used as THE artist name?

MusicBrainz
1

There’s a group called “Of the Wand & the Moon” which is sometimes stylized as “:Of the Wand & the Moon:”.

Some of their albums use the colons, others don’t. When they don’t, some editors input the unstylized name as an artist credit. Otherwise, the stylized name is used as the default.This has the really annoying consequence of creating two separate album artist tags unless one checks the “standardize artist names” box in Picard.

The stylized name is also bad for sorting if your media player doesn’t support %albumartistsort%.

So, my questions are these:

  1. How to avoid the problem of stylized and unstylized names creating separate albumartist tags?

  2. When should the default artist name be the stylized? Always, or just when it’s used frequently/consistently over the plain name?

2

A similar discussion can be hand with just swapping “&” and “and” that some Artist do. And the answer then is to use what is shown on the Release. A Recording uses what is used on the first Release. The database is about a record of what is used and does not need to concern itself as to how the data is used outside the database.

For tagging, if you don’t want to use Picard’s build in “Standardise Artist Names”, then I would advise setting up an exception in Picard to catch the names and standardise them. I doubt you’ll have that many artist you’ll need to add to a list.

I do this for all the fancy hyphens-dashes-apostrophe’s as they can cause similar chaos to a file system and media centre. I strip them at a ripping level, and don’t let Picard add them into my tags.

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3

If we hesitate between 2 names, we can distribute points:

  • Give 1 point to the name of the last releases
  • Give 1 point to the name that is shown on official homepage
  • Give 1 point to the name that is used the most
  • Give 1 point to the original name

Then see which one has more points. :wink:
It’s maybe silly. Maybe criterias are wrong, But I think some criterias should be checked and the name change edit should list its reasons.

4

Your scoring system would need weighting. For example, official home page should score higher otherwise you could get a heap of Digital Releases making daft decisions.

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5

And considering how volatile is digital release info, then physical release and printed should also weigh more. :relaxed:

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