Let’s talk about zero-padding in track titles of audiobooks and dramas.
As you know, track titles of audiobooks (and by extension audio dramas) are entered as Part N if no better name is available.
This is covered by the style guidelines for audiobooks
However, there seems to be disagreement on how exactly you should implement this.
Some audiobooks are added with zero-padding if they have more than 10 tracks. A track than might have the name “Track 09”, followed by “Track 10” (or local equivelant). An example can be seen here:
The style guidelines aren’t explicitly stating that zero-padding should or should not be used but I would argue that it would state that it should be used if this were intended.
While sorting and editing my audiobooks and dramas I edited many releases to remove zero-padding. This has generally been approved and upvoted (or ignored). However, for the second time now, someone has disagreed.
The argument for zero-padding seems to be that it allows sorting files by their track / file name. I personally don’t see why that is important since 99% of all releases cannot be sorted that way. However, I thought that this warrants some discussion.
As you say, there is no written guideline on this. But there was an unwritten one that let people put track names in a way that was more useable to older MP3 players. A huge number of audiobooks are already entered in this form.
You said in that edit where we talked you were being “consistent”. Yet it is also consistent to have two or three digit track names. Your OCD is clashing with other people’s equally neat OCD.
That’s true. What I’m getting at is that most audiobooks seem to not use zero-padding (although I obviously do not have a statistic on this). But yes, both styles are quite common
Not sure where you get that stat from. Most of the audiobooks I own have zero padding due to a history of older MP3 players.
Zero padding does not upset a new player. And is therefore more community friendly.
Also this isn’t about digital media which already had file name. These are CDs that have no track names. And making that data readable and usable in a consistent way.
I guess that depends on the kind of audiobooks you listen to; for me it’s the other way around.
I’m honestly still a bit confused by this. Yes, if the file name would be the track title then older players would struggle with non zero-padded tracks. However, every tagging programm I know puts the track number in front of the track by default. Was this not the case ~5 years ago?
Not always. That is purely down to how you have a tagging program setup. Some will just tag a track name. And old MP3 CDs had CDs full of just MP3s with file names already fixed as text. I am talking much older than five years back on those.
MB data is not supposed to be designed around tagging anyway. It generally gets set by people talking about it. Or following conventions that have been in place within the community. It is why I did not know how to respond to your massed edits as it seemed to me to loose what parts of the community used to do.
Ah, I think I misunderstood your earlier point. Are you saying that if the .mp3s on mp3 /data CDs are named with zero-padding than MB should reflect that?
I think that’s a fair point since it is the intention of the creators.
However, zero-padding is also used for many other kinds of releases.
For example, the edits I linked in my original posts are from a regular CD release.
Exactly. You deleted the data that many previous editors had taken a lot of time to put into place. CDs don’t have track lists. Some editors were following convention of zero padding to also help out other users of the data.
My impression is that it is no accident that the guideline does not say to use zero padding (e.g. where it says “Part N”, it would be explicit to use zero padding). But who knows.
Maybe this is something for @reosarevok to clarify?
It does seem like the kind of thing a tagger script/plugin could deal to, rather than editing back and forth (that is, regardless of whether we end up with zero padding in the DB or not, I’m sure Picard could remove or add padding after “Part…”).
I certainly don’t think zero-padding was ever intended - it seems useless in any case on the MusicBrainz side and I would vote down such an edit with zero hesitation unless the zero-padded numbers were explicitly printed.
As @aerozol said, this is the kind of thing that can fairly easily be changed with tagger configuration for people who specifically want zero-padding.
