#musicbrainz

reosarevok closed my favorite discourse thread? curses! foiled again!

You have strange favourites.

thanks!

CallerNo6: Yeah, that's pretty disappointing. ;-)

well, I mean, the underlying questions are good ones. is MB data easy to use? if not, is there a way to improve?

Yeah. I'm actually not a huge fan of the CSG weirdness either.

It's just the best that seems to be possible at the moment.

I really don't like the idea of a CSG "flag", mostly because there will be edge cases and I don't see what possible benefit there would be out of it

I don't understand.

?

I don't understand the "edge cases" part.

I mean releases that are borderline between classical and pop

But all a CSG flag says is "this releases was entered using CSG". Not "the immutable nature of this release is Classical".

er, s/releases/release/

That doesn't really solve the problem though -- someone comes along and goes "oh, that's not classical" -- changes the flag and edits accordingly.

I think we're talking about two different things.

If they edit it to be non-CSG, of course they should change the flag.

Or, maybe I should ask, what do you think the problem is?

I think the problem is that CSG overrides the standard artist credits and basically forces it to "composer"

When indeed not all releases actually do that (just most of them)

Well, okay, that's /a/ problem :-)

I would say that arguably most (classical) releases don't really have track artists per se.

IIUC, the problem ijabz is trying to solve is "I have no idea if this was entered using CSG, so I don't know what criteria the editor used to determine the track artist"

Yeah, that...but I don't really see how it helps.

So you know the artist is the composer...how does that help?

You can already find that out by comparing track artist to composer AR

If there is one.

yes.

but my point is what do you as a tagger/player/whatever do differently if you know the track artist is the composer?

presumably ijabz has some ideas about how to display them differently.

or what if you want to override CSG? it would help if you /knew/ it was a CSG release.

when tagging your own files, I mean.

I think the comparison, "does track artist equal composer" covers that though. And if it's missing then fix the data.

I mean, if "CSG weirdness" is a problem , then doesn't flagging something as CSG at least help mitigate the weirdness?

That just bothers me aesthetically.

Okay, you're right, if I'm tagging my own files then I'll fix the MB entry (if it's incomplete).

Not every Picard user wants to be an MB editor.

(although maybe they would be if they knew that the mission statement is #MitigateTheWeirness!

)

grr. Typos are ruining my bad jokes.

I really would like to know how one handle it differently though, if you knew it's csg

how one *would*

Well, okay, so you're going to display a track, and you want to overeride CSG track artists.

You could compare `track artist` to `composer`. but what if, I dunno, Taylor Swift is the composer and the track artist?

So then you look at the recording rels to see if the performance credits are different.

Taylor Swift is almost certainly credited for vocals, but is that enough to go by?

that's a lot of hoops to jump through when all you want to do is decide "should I use the `track artist` or `recording artist` in my display?"

hmm.

Couldn't you just assume recording artist then?

I guess you could use `recording artist` by default ... er, that ^

It really depends on what you're trying to do, I think.

Me? I'm trying to avoid invoicing. It gives me panic attacks.

Personally I think the best solution would be allow there to be no track artist at all.

Then most classical could have no artist

so it's neither ugly nor 'wrong'.

I'll have to think about that one.

I'm not a die-hard composer-as-track-artist partisan either. But changing it at this point would be huge.

It would, yes.

I really like the recording-artist-as-performer bit, track artist is way less important to me.

CallerNo6: I mean that for most or at least many classical releases they are closer to ARs than track artists.

i.e. it is better in the composer field than a track artist.

This discussion always comes down to ambiguity of "artist" (composer vs performer in this case). If we were to do anything to flag the style used, I would think it would be "track artist is composer"/"track artist is performer" clarification.

hawke: the main utility of a flag is allowing stuff (from userscripts to eventually a full-fledged classical-oriented editor if someone wrote one) to apply to releases marked as classical

Or well, as "csg" anyway

Apparently, it's useful for some people in Picard and the like - I'm not sure why, but it doesn't really hurt and it doesn't change how we store the data, so why not

When I tag with Picard, I get most/all the relationships into the tags and they work great. That might be because the player I use handles the collections of artists, though.

It was fun to ask for all the recordings that had some person playing solo violin, though!

thebradleys, your player let you filter for solo violin?

We all deserve a player that does!

Musicbee

When I was looking for one, it was one of the few that would split collections of artists in the tags

Aww, Windows only

Although I mostly stream stuff anyway so

(It's pretty nice how good the classical catalogue in Spotify is - also pretty sad how hard it is to find things that are indeed there...)

Streaming is a whole different issue - we don't get much control over the source tagging and search.

Yeah

Spotify pays for our data

So what would be cool is an mb-aware playlist manager that worked w/ streaming sites

But it doesn't use it for making classical good at least :p

I was excited to see Spotify using the MB data - I'm sure it would take them a lot of effort to search all of that data. Apart from searching, if you at least had the mbids in the stream, the player could pull all kinds of good information by itself.

totally. if spotify, if you only do one thing with MB data, please use/expose MBIDs

oh, hawke: another possible use would be for me (or even better, a group of us) to try and review all new additions with that flag to fix them up :p

You might even be able to query against the relationships if they are available and compare since you know which ones should be involved.

reosarevok, doesn't that assume that somebody 1) entered a release poorly, but 2) knew enough to flag it "CSG"?

Yeah

That's why it's doable :D

I like you, kid. You've got spunk.

(there are waaay too many classical releases being added to be able to check them all easily, but it might be possible to at least try to make sure the ones marked CSG are actually decent CSG)