#musicbrainz-devel

But mr. dictator himself just said yes? :p

I mean that they're useful for sorting

that doesnt mean its not debatable.

Oh, ok

You know, so we don't get gummy bear secret police in plainclothes beating us

:)

you forget the "benevolent" in BDFL

my secret police comes and GIVES you gummy bears

aww

Ok

So what do we need to debate?

nikki, why would we not use sortname?

so I can find japanese artists for once :P

(and chinese artists are even worse, they have so many different spellings/pronunciations that one surname ends up all over the alphabet)

Maybe the problem is the sort only with latin itself then?

it's the way our sortnames are done in general

everywhere sorts things differently, but we can only store one

Any good idea?

:p

add a type field to aliases

have "sortname" as a type, then use the language field to set sortnames for particular locales

not a bad idea

Wel

*well

(and search hint could be another type, so we'd know which aliases are proper ones and which are just gibberish we added)

We kinda need that type field anyway

To separate

Yeah, what nikki said

(and birth name would make a good type too, for artists who don't use a load of performance names, but also don't use their birth name... which is what discogs has afaik)

(that is, barely if at all)

Well

Name w/o surname -> NGS artist credit for birth name?

I just don't like the idea of treating artists differently because they have more or less performance names

but they normally don't use the birth name

(e.g. madonna, alizee)

And don't like the idea of losing the current legal name use

Hmm

I've run into quite a few problems because we split too many names

Please explain :)

I've seen one release with credits for the artist's full name, and a re-release with credits for the performance name

so who do I link to?

One for each, on NGS?

but it's one composer (or whatever the credit was), not composed by real name & performance name

Hmm, true

and one thing I've seen way too many times is an artist who uses different characters from their real name, but with the same pronunciation... then who do I use when the credit is in latin? they're both exactly the same in latin characters :/

Why can't the music industry be constant? :(

in those cases I just didn't add the credits at all :/

:/

Yeah, sounds complicated

and nowhere else I know treats them as separate artists, it's just us adding separate entries because the names aren't the same

I would mention wikipedia, but of course they don't use separate pages

they hate the fact a page is used at all :P

I probably wouldn't mind having them all as one artist *after* we get artist credits for ARs

But that still means doing different things for "performance names" and "performance names, but not so much"

Where do you put the limit?

we'll have that problem anyway with artist credits, what's an artist credit and what's a performance name?

I know

And that's a great question :p

but for me it's basically if they have separate "careers" or not

How separate, though?

If an artist releases a record under name A, another under (completely different) name B, then back to name A, but the three records are stylistically the same

Is that one career?

Also, I have one artist who uses two names, one for making beats, and another to rap on them

(and uses both on his albums at the same time)

(not clearly related names at all, btw)

How do you call that?

without knowing the artist I don't think I could really say, I can think of one artist who did a single under a different name that I would probably consider the same because the song was included on her other albums (still credited to the other name, but clearly not completely separate)

and for the beats/rap one, they'd need to be separate for now anyway, but if there's a clear distinction, then I could see why they'd be kept separate

And in the end I didn't really get if I should jira the sortname for browse thing or not :p

oh, more, when you have things like "Foolongnameius Bar" and "Foo Bar" as a performance name, who do you use when it's credited to "F. Bar" or "Bar"? (likewise "if you have Foolongnameius Bar" and "F. Bar", who do you use for "Foo Bar"?)

You mean like it being "Full Name + Surname" and "Short Name + Surname"?

yeah

Those should probably be together

The main question would be "who's the main artist for the mbid, and who are artist credits" though

and if you don't pick the full name as the main artist, how do you enter it? :)