1 Topic by PixelEater (edited by PixelEater 2012-05-10 01:41:46)

  • Registered: 2009-01-13

Topic: Multiple artists, multiple titles all on one remix album

I have here an album that, even according to its current MusicBrainz entry, should disregard the titles and artists involved in each song. That doesn't feel right though, so let me see if I understand the style rules correctly. The remix album in question is Madlib's Mind Fusion Vol. 4. The titles as found on the database are like so...

01. Madlib - Remixes, Part 1
02. Madlib - Remixes, Part 2
03. Madlib - Remixes, Part 3
04. Madlib - Remixes, Part 4
05. Madlib - Nas vs. Jay-Z, Part 1
06. Madlib - Nas vs. Jay-Z, Part 2
07. Madlib - Nas vs. Jay-Z, Part 3
08. Madlib - From the CDP Archives
09. Madlib - Interlude
10. Madlib - Remixes, Part 5
11. Madlib - Remixes, Part 6
12. Madlib - Remixes, Part 7
13. Madlib - Remixes, Part 8
14. Madlib - Remixes, Part 9

The album artist is "Madlib", but in reality nearly every song is a (Madlib remix) of other artists. Of course it would probably be too much to notate that everywhere.

This seems to be the relevant guideline page... http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Title … ple_titles
...and this is two pages with all the actual artists and titles: http://www.rappcats.com/hotshit/madlib- … ion-vol-4/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Fusion#Volume_4

It almost seems like what it's saying is ideally I might go so far as to format everything like this:

01. DJ Roddy Rod / Frank n Dank / O Solo - Getup / Pause / 6 Minutes / Instrumental
02. Madvillain - Butter King Jewels
03. RZA ft. Method Man / The LOX - La Rumba / Wild Out

...and so on. Maybe artists should be separated by commas, I'm sure there are some programs that recognize that. What do you guys make of this? Obviously it could be overkill, but is there really a better way (preferably using default ID3 categories) to tag this useful information? I hardly consider parts 1-4 of X chapter as adequate titles, in fact I can think of albums like from King Crimson that do the opposite of this, but maybe a styling rule addresses this directly. On another note, I am not a fan of space slash space. I honestly like them without the gaps, but I guess it's the standard to better accommodate wrapping fields and prevent information from lumping together. Would it be contrarian or poor form do you think if I stuck with this/way/of/doing/things?

  • From: Tartu, EE
  • Registered: 2010-11-24

Re: Multiple artists, multiple titles all on one remix album

I would be OK with that formatting, but I'd prefer space slash space - as you said, it makes the information less lumped and easier to parse. Also, and if we wanted to be pedantic, for separating stuff that includes spaces Chicago recommends spacing too: "If one or both of the terms separated by the slash consist of two or more words, a space before and after the slash may aid comprehension". (also, that's how we usually do it :) )

  • Registered: 2009-01-13

Re: Multiple artists, multiple titles all on one remix album

One thing that occurred to me is how ridiculous it is to scrobble things if we don't leave the information as-is in the database. Is this possibly one reason it's entered that way? Is there a better formatting option that may have a positive impact on this, such as commas rather than slashes in the artist field? Also, who/what is Chicago?

  • From: Tartu, EE
  • Registered: 2010-11-24

Re: Multiple artists, multiple titles all on one remix album

Chicago is the Chicago Manual of Style. Slashes on the artist field are apparently even recommended by ID3 for mp3 tagging, and (more importantly) it's the MusicBrainz standard. Scrobbling priorities should never go over having correct data - once last.fm finally finish their move to disambiguate artists and learn to read MBIDs better (they're working on it) scrobbling should be able to adapt to our data anyway.