There is an issue with the way performance / technical ARs were split between releases and release groups that has come up before:
http://musicbrainz.org/edit/14960762 and to which I believe we still don't have a solution. I've just encountered it again when doing the ARs for Madonna's MDNA album. At least according to: http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Next_Generation_Schema/Track_Relationships_Conversion the conversion of artist->release ARs does not seem to have been considered (correct me if I'm wrong). As it stands, only a handful of ARs can be added between an artist and a release group (e.g. tribute album) while the full gamut of performed vocal, engineered, etc. can be added between an artist and a release. This doesn't make sense, especially with the new form of release in NGS. Prior to NGS, a release had several release events so a release captured the same set of tracks even if released at different dates in different territories. It wasn't perfect -- you'd still have the issue of another release because of a bonus track for example -- but they're were fewer releases per release group. For example, http://musicbrainz.org/release-group/23b63e85-be33-3b6d-abef-bd42230a7f04 would only have two releases before, whereas now it has four. So a problem that existed before has been exacerbated by the arrival of NGS. You can see the edit above for an example or consider what I'm now faced with. The MDNA inlay lists copious amounts of data on a per-track basis which I've already turned into ARs: see the recordings on http://musicbrainz.org/release/e5620e6c-77e7-4840-be19-178f0dfc2603 What I'm now faced with is the final paragraph which lists more general non-track-specific ARs. For example, it lists a number of assistant engineers and Madonna as executive producer. At present, these can't be added to the release group; the option simply isn't available. So we're left with either the release or all the recordings. Neither works. * If we add them to the release, then they are unique to the deluxe UK edition and aren't applied to the other nine releases we so far have of this album. * If we add them to the recordings, then we cause confusion and in some cases this isn't even possible. A number of the people listed as assistant engineers are also listed at the track-specific level (for example, Angie Teo is listed as an engineer for "Masterpiece" and "Falling Free"). Madonna is already listed as producing each track, so attempting to add an executive production credit would collide with that. I also very much doubt that all the assistant engineers worked on all recordings, as three different recording studios in three different countries are involved. Clearly, a choice has been made in the inlay to make some credits on the individual recordings and some at a general level. I think we should honour that, so adding them to the recordings is inappropriate. I could add them to the release, but as I say, they are then tied to a specific date, country and version of the album when they actually apply to them all. For now, I'm going to list them in the annotation, but we need to allow such ARs at release group level. I would suggest that all the ARs available to releases are available for release groups. If it suits releases, then it also suits a set of them in my opinion. The exception I would make is the composed/wrote lyrics/wrote ARs which seem to exist mainly because they existed on releases prior to works. I don't think we should encourage them being added at release group level too. Thoughts? -- Andii :-) _______________________________________________ MusicBrainz-style mailing list MusicBrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
