#musicbrainz

Question - there's a cd ("Colors of the World: Papua New Guinea"), which is a compilation from 1999. It looks like none of the artists are credited on the CD. It's on Spotify, but everything is credited to "World Geographic Explorer". So if I'm putting this into MusicBrainz, who are the artists on each track? Is it blank (can it be blank) or is it

"World Geographic Explorer", or someone else

I bet if I'm able to get a copy of the disc or of the audio I can see what the AcoustIDs are, but I bet Shazam will just point to the same compilation. The ISRCs from Spotify are credited to "World Geographic Explorer"

probably "[unknown]"

So, Various Artists for the release/rg, [unknown] for the tracks unless I can ID recordings somehow? Sounds reasonable

yeah, I think so.

though I am not an expert on this type of release

some of the releases in the series have credited artists on discogs...

Yep! A lot of them do, but I think the "explorers" series doesn't include artists, and their absence is noted on quite a few pages (cf this fan site http://www.sahmigo.com/details/p/papua_new_guin... )

Okay, this is funny... that same compilation of '60s PNG music is being shopped around to a bunch of vendors, none of which credit the artists https://www.flipkart.com/voyager-series-rhythms... https://open.spotify.com/album/2KceMdouG4lT8oyJ...

not too surprising, sadly :( that's how a lot of folk/world music gets done

my hunch is that the original production didn't bother with credits

so the reason all the downstream don't have them is that they effectively don't exist.

vzctr: you can also do [unknown] credited as [World Geographic Explorer], if you think it will help people with identification etc :)

sounds like a super interesting rabbit hole! if you can get your findings into mb somehow then time well spent for sure

brb, just releasing a totally fresh Papa New Guinea compilation on Spotify

Melanesian '60s surfer rock, so hot right now

I submitted acoustIDs for the recordings and got 1 other hit on all of them... but just "Track01", "Track02", etc

nothing, even for the more famous ("famous") songs on there, so they must all be covers by some group in PNG

I nerdsniped myself enough with this 😂

this (no actual artist credits) is my main beef with "world" and "natgeo" style recordings.

like "oh yea document all the weird and wonderful different living music traditions of th world.. but ignore who the people are actually playing it in the recording you're doing?

🙄

it's low-key dehumanising. more interested in the "culture" thna the actual human individuals

some guy with a bone in his nose playing a mouth bow while his cousin and daughters sing and play decorated homemade drums and strings are *still* ___artists__ with names

CatQuest: one of the reasons I appreciate the lomax father/son duo, even though they exoticized, they cared about accreditation

Frank & Anne Warner copyrighted the songs they collected jointly with their sources. Frank Proffitt made a ton of money on “Tom Dooley” as a result… whereas we don’t even know who these PNG schlubs are. Sad.

agreed

The weird thing with this compilation is that there are a few songs that are more famous, or are imports/covers ("Walkabout Long Chinatown" is from the Solomon Islands, for example).

derwin: I find the lumping together of folk/world music kind of distasteful. The latter is a relatively recent phenomenon and primarily a commercial one. When Alan Lomax and Shirle Collins toured the American south, there was no such thing as World music. And Alan Lomax certainly didn't exoticise as much as the modern 'world music' labels do today

Some journo was tweeting about how "world" music has died, because you can just stream the artists directly. You don't need to hope that some label compiles the right, say, afro house track, or that some A&R guy will stumble upon William Onyeabor

I'm not sure about the accrediation aspect though. As I recall it (and I'm not 100% certain on this one), Alan Lomax the younger would get those he recorded to sign a contract handing over royalties to him

I was going through my parents' CD collection trying to find stuff, one thing that struck me is how compilation-driven music collections were before the internet

that's because people only wanted one or two singles and with CDs, they would much more often try to make you buy the whole album. buying the compilation with multiple hits is going to be the cheapest way to get the desired result

yeah, it makes total sense, just something I didn't think about since I grew up with iTunes

(note that this varies in different markets - even now, cd singles are still sold in japan, for some reason)

japan is reall the exception, it is the last bastion of physical media which isn't trendy records people buy but don't pla

play*

at least in the UK that's totally not true. there were 16m CDs sold in the UK in 2020, but only 4.8m records

ev: yes, that seems more reasonable

and both CDs and LPs are nothing compared to streaming

Maybe some LP sales are being missed, but I find it diffficult to believe that e.g. Bandcamp is accounting for 12m missing LPs (and Bandcamp actually reports sales figures)

i am more concerned about lossy vs lossless streaming and downloads

music downloads are almost certainly pretty niche. The sales figures I can find account for sstreaming services and say nothing about things like the Amazon MP3 store

i mean, sure i rip them and put into musicplayer. but still

one day i'll achive my goal of getting a hold of a cd jukebox thing, it'll play any song or every disc randomly

sigh, probably not possible

i read somewhere that ripping with replaygain makes the flacs lossy...

maybe in the flac(1) manpage

so not the ripping, but the transcoding from .wav to .flac

how would it?

replaygain just adds some metadata to the files so that a player can adjust playback volume automatically

it doesn't make any changes to the audio data

(some tools have options to modify the audio to the levels specified by the replaygain metadata for compatibility with players that don't support replaygain, but those options are usually explicitly marked as lossy)

replaygain is definitely tags

flac is lossless, it has no lossyness. you can transcode losslessly from flac to wav and back again

a source of confusion may be pre-emphasis on certain early CD masters, iTunes and such can detect and correct for thiss (as should be done, otherwise the equalisation is wrong), but this isn't common anymore

if you encode a WAV file with flac and then decode it back to WAV, it is a perfect representation of the original file (it may not be bit for bit perfect as there are certain blocks that the flac encoding may ignore, but these are not part of the audio)

if you use the "--apply-replaygain-which-is-not-lossless" option when decoding a flac to wav, then it will apply the replaygain (which is not lossless)

but that's kind of all in the name :)

Ugh... https://musicbrainz.org/edit/84858540

I'm confused, is this a bootleg? or an advert?

I am trying to add a disc id to a release, however, the listing has tracks 1-15, but the disc reports 16 tracks (because of leading data track) and I can't make headds or tails of how to fix

kidclamp: your discid has 16 tracks?

There's an existing 15 track discid, so maybe there's two versions?

well, not it has 15 tracks, 2-16

Well, it should still have 16, just 1 is data, then?

Yes, so if I open in rhythmbox, 15 tracks - reported to musicbrainz 16

liner lists 1-15

Yeah

I expect you'd want a second release in the same group, with a track 1 [data track] and then the usual 15 tracks in 2-16

yep

yeah, it sorta works - picard understands it now, but rhythmbox only understands 15 tracks - so the titles are all off - but that's a rhythmbox problem I supose

thanks all!

vinyl is made of plastic. heavy, fragile plastic that can't be recycled. thank you for coming to my ted talk.

ev: "world" is a stupid concept, sure, it's alternately either "what we call folk music that isn't from america or the UK" or "all music not from america or the UK"

ev: but ultimately, if the world didn't want their music branded as world, they should have been a giant country whose music industry dominated the world for a century /shrug