On 1.8.2009, at 3.40, Brian Schweitzer wrote: > Why do we want to group different versions of an album together, > even if one has bonus tracks, or one has a bonus disc? At heart, > they're still essentially the same audio, even if there is more > audio (via extra tracks, etc) on some versions. We group stero and > mono versions together, but that's still the *same* audio, just > (relatively minorly) different mixes of it.
Once you take a deeper look into this, you'll notice that this really only applies to albums, and not all of them either. It doesn't apply to (all) singles - the edit notes already mentioned that some singles contain no common tracks; they are only part of a semantic group, defined, in the end, by the publisher. On the other hand, you already mentioned remixes, which share the recording but don't share the release group with the original album. Let It Be [... Naked] is an example of an album which is broken into two different release groups, even though it's mostly just a question of remixing/remastering - people just seem to think they are different enough. And how about compilations? There's no common recording, no same session. The contents of different versions of a compilation may vary wildly; for an example, see King of Pop by Michael Jackson (http://musicbrainz.org/release-group/4940f9c1-389b-3366-8745-e861adc1b95f.html ) which has different contents for different countries. Yes, they have same tracks, too, but the real common nominator is the name and semantic notion of compilation. > After all, are we trying to achieve clean-looking artist listings, > or are we actually trying to acurately document audio release > groups, using some consistent standard? To tell the truth, it looks like the first one is the more useful part of release groups - and isn't that the reason they were introduced ahead of schedule? That doesn't mean the release groups should be created randomly. Consistent standard is nice. However, that doesn't mean that standard should be the same across all release classes. To tell the truth, I don't think it _can_ be the same across all release classes, and definitely not the way you're trying to define it. -- Sami Sundell ssund...@iki.fi _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list Musicbrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
