"most cases of "missing vocal tracks with no other instruments taking their place" fall under karaoke"
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^ that's their suggestion, as apparently it's a common situation to have other instruments jump in and then it's often not really karaoke (though maybe you think it is?)
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Silver_Skree
hey all. I was talking with aerozol on the Discord after noticing that we now have a karaoke performance type for linking Works to Recordings, so I went to the Relationships chat ( https://musicbrainz.org/relationships ) to get some guidance on how to use it, and what the exact distinction is from the instrumental attribute...
However, I found the text on the performance attributes page to be kind of ambiguous, so I mulled it over (in text, at length :p ) in the Discord until I kind of came up with an interpretation that makes a lot of sense to me
I also realized that attributes are non-exclusive, so there needs to be valid cases for karaoke, instrumental, and karaoke+instrumental, so I thought for a bit about what each of those kinds of things "should" look like
the answer I came up with was more or less this...
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kepstin
i wouldn't think there would be any use case for karaoke+instrumental, hmm.
Silver_Skree
First, Karaoke: A recording has had vocal tracks removed, whether that be all of them, or just the lead(s), with backing tracks remaining, and (importantly) no instruments taking their place to "fill up" the melody again
Next, Instrumental is indicative that there are *no* vocals whatsoever, either in terms of backing tracks or leads
So that would def. get used in cases where an instrument fills the role of the vocals
kepstin
instrumental generally refers to a recording of a work that was designed to be listened to on its own as a complete recording with no vocal part (including with no vocal part sung over top of it later)
Silver_Skree
Karaoke + Instrumental would be what you have when a song is stripped of all its vocal tracks, whether it only ever had one or multiple, and nothing is added to restore the melody, leaving it both "pure" and with room to be sung over if the listener so wants
I'd agree, kepstin, but I kind of had a crisis when I realized that all attributes are (at least mechanically) non-exclusive, so there should be some thought given as to what the combinations would look like, unless the idea is that certain combos are just forbidden in the guidelines
kepstin
yeah, i don't think karaoke+instrumental makes any sense
with karaoke, the lyrics are relevant - with instrumental, the lyrics are not relevant
can't really have both :)
Silver_Skree
thing is, that's kind of an odd and very subjective metric
it leaves a lot of room for conflict, where it'd be nice to have something more empirical
Wherever you fall back on relevance, "intent" gets involved
kepstin
musicbrainz is all about intent :)
Silver_Skree
sure-- honoring it where it's present or knowable
but there's a lot of grievance in many cases where it's either unknowable or there is no real intent one way or another and the artist just doesn't care, lol
anyway, tangent
I didn't come here to dicuss intent :p
kepstin
yeah, some guidelines to assist guessing in the cases where intent isn't clear would be helpful.
like "if the track has instruments performing the vocal melody, it is probably instrumental, and probably not karaoke"
it's usually very clear if tracks are for karaoke, since they're normally explicitly marked or stated to be so.
(although wording for that is locale variant)
Silver_Skree
I've pretty much made my thoughts known; if the style lead agrees (with either of us) then I think it'd be nice to have some updated/more clear guidelines for the performance attributes page: https://musicbrainz.org/relationship/a3005666-a...
that sums up my request-- thank y'all for your time :)
kepstin
I do think that we should note in the guidelines that tracks are normally instrumental or karaoke, but not both.
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King_DuckZ
aerozol: I saw your message now, sorry
don't worry, I mean, I'm just not adding that particular album to my collection for now, the songs I like are in a compilation anyways
still, I think there should be a solution at some point. I can bring up many albums with this issue, it's not so rare an occurrence
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aerozol
King_DuckZ: all good! I'll add the stuff anyway so you can see how it looks with works (in a few hours when I'm home)
As I said it's not really a solution for your actual problem... But interesting that MB at least has a framework for 1 recording containing multiple songs
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King_DuckZ
yep indeed!
thanks for looking into this :) if you post a link I'll have a look asap, it's a bit late here now so I'm going to bed now
