#musicbrainz

I mark broadcasts as official, unless I am using track times etc from a specific bootleg recording. But it's a bit of a moot point as broadcasts that were never 'released' as digital media etc usually just get added as recordings anyway?

I believe most of the actual broadcast releases that I add have been streamable on the BBC, or add podcasts, so they are obviously official.

Wow, the "sorry I haven't a clue" entries are impressive! Great job protopia / Sophist-UK

I believe the guidelines at https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_type... are vague re. bootleg vs official because it's something the community is unlikely to agree on. That guideline does a lot of 'making it work for everyone'. A lot of editors wouldn't consider a radio broadcast a "release". Which means that you would either have no release dates for anything, or the date someone uploaded a rip,

both of which are pretty useless for tagging.

Technically, in MB terms, they should probably all be recordings put into series etc, but they are buried by the interface and a lot of editors don't use them. They also lack stuff like release date - which the guidelines have always worked around by squeezing the release date into the recording title (and still do)

Basically, I don't think MB handles broadcasts well at all atm. I'm not sure a guideline change can fix it, but if anyone has ideas, the last lot of (minor, imo) guideline changes only took a few years to get through, I've got every back for another round 😛

*I've got energy back

yvanzo: For some reason the "Events with event art" stat is translated into French as "Événements sans image" which is obviously wrong. I was going to just say "avec image" but I see we do "Parutions avec illustration" so dunno which of the two words is best

Also, "Pieces of event art" seems fineish as "Images d’événement" but "Pieces of cover art" as "Types d’illustration" is also clearly wrong unless I'm missing something :)

(was adding more art stats, hence ending up there)

Thanks for spotting it. Yes, “illustration” used to be the French translation for “cover art”, but it is now gradually replaced with “image” (following your example in Spanish).

Ok :) I'll let you fix it since you're already working on these things then :)

<aerozol[m]> "Wow, the "sorry I haven't a clue..." <- Still a lot of work to go.

<aerozol[m]> "I believe the guidelines at..." <- I am not sure we would want every one of the 500+ ISIHAC broadcasts as a separate release rather than to group them into one release per Series.

And I am back to being unclear about whether a Broadcast (episode or series) should be an Official release or a "Bootleg".

<protopia[m]> "Still a lot of work to go." <- If anyone is willing to grant me temporary autoedit privileges so that I don't have to wait for the edits to go through that would be helpful. But I do understand if the ad-hoc nature of my editing frequency makes me unsuitable.

* grant me (temporary, * temporary) autoedit

There is no clarity as to whether a “unreleased” broadcast should be official or a bootleg, because technically these artificial series “releases” should not be in MB. However, because having everything in recordings or individual releases not how broadcast editors/taggers use MB (and would be wildly impractical), the guidelines try to give as much guidance as possible for both approaches, without having them collide. And

without implicitly saying what is allowed and disallowed

I would prefer bigger changes, but getting community consensus on something that changes fundamental MB approaches to “releases” was not possible when I tried. And not for lack of trying...

Hats off for following the broadcast recording naming guideline 🤠 And I like the approach of having the link to all the releases in the annotation. I am open to suggestions to update the guidelines as well, with the caveat that it needs to be a concise and precise change that can be discussed, not open ended

The only change that I can see, at a glance, for ISIHAC is that the official releases/collections can also be marked as ‘broadcast’

There is a big difficulty with Broadcasts that hasn't yet been discussed - namely that there is a world of difference between a very popular even iconic, long-running series like ISIHAC which is of broadish interest over a period of decades, and yesterday's local news broadcast bulletin from a small-town back-of-beyond radio station that is of no interest a day later (or an hour later or perhaps even 5 minutes later). So we have to

be careful NOT to start classifying every broadcast as a release for want of getting MB polluted with broadcast records for broadcasts that are genuinely of no interest or value whatsoever. Clearly there is a continuum between ISIHAC and the local news bulletin, and there is presumably a dividing line somewhere on that continuum but who is to say where that dividing line should be and how to measure where it is and which side a

particular broadcast sits on.

Nevertheless, we do have Broadcast as a Primary Release Group type, so it might reasonably be inferred that Broadcasts can indeed be releases. But if this is the case, then what distinguishes a broadcast that is a release from those which aren't? TBH, any example I come up with that associates e.g. a CD with a broadcast (like the ISIHAC CDs for example), ends up with the Release being a CD. (

The ISIHAC CDs currently have a Primary Release Group Type of "Other" rather than "Album" OR "Broadcast". I have no idea whether this is right either - since they are effectively CD releases of a Broadcast, should their Primary Type be Broadcast rather than "Other"? And how does the RG work when a 2x CD (set) consists of 4x broadcasts on separate dates?

The real answer - if there is one - is that there is infinite variety and yet we want to apply a set of rules consistently.

* rules consistently. And that is a contradiction.

My own view would be to be flexible about things and suggest that Broadcasts can be recorded as Release Groups either individually or by Series, and that they are "Official" if they are an accurate and complete record of an entire broadcast and "Bootleg" if they are some sort of edited version or compilation. Sure, that opens MB up to having the local news bulletin as a Release Group, but only if someone can be bothered to enter it

(or write automated code to enter it) - and perhaps we just need to make all new Broadcast RG edits voteable rather than auto-accepted.

As said, official collections/CDs of broadcasts should have the broadcast release group type. So I would not infer anything from the type existing

So the ISIHAC CDs (which are re-releases of Broadcasts) should be "official" "broadcast", and the actual broadcasts should be "bootleg" "broadcast"?

Agreed re. mostly everything else. Keeping flexibility, e.g. not explicity forbidding fake (according to the MB schema, I'm not making a judgment call) release groups, is why the guidelines are a bit vague in pieces, more or less. Explicitly allowing them was something I tried to do. Over time I'm not sure if that's the right decision anyway, though... Hopefully the guidelines at least allow for consistency when editing either way

No opinion re bootleg vs official, but they should all be 'broadcast' type imo

Sidenote: I think there are ways to make the UI surface recordings and series that would make it possible to enter things that aren't releases (e.g. broadcast series and video and film soundtracks) without them being buried in MB. Realistically this still wouldn't appeal to everyone unless/until Picard supported tagging with them, and maybe other taggers and databases used them too... Tricky!!