Comment by Lammy
2 days ago
I used to do the MusicBrainz thing with Picard and later with Beets, but I got sick of Somebody Else's Metadata because of MusicBrainz's (former?) policy where everything must be Title Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve. I prefer my tags to match the artist's choice, because I consider it a tonal indicator that helps set the mood for the work.
It seems like they might not enforce that any more since the album I was going to pick on as an example is now tagged like I have it, although I also have lower-case “my bloody valentine” Artist tags on every track with Title Cased “My Bloody Valentime” Album-Artist tag for browsing in Navidrome: https://musicbrainz.org/release/1e4c282b-8b0d-4d20-9f74-175f...
…but I already got out of the habit and will still just keep typing them out myself :)
I also always include the catalog number in the Comment field and in brackets in my folder names to separate different releases of supposedly the same thing. Good example of why you would want to do this is the 2004 vs the 2007 releases of MM..FOOD? where the last track (Kookies) had to be redone to remove the Sesame Street samples:
- 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_XcL4nYos
- 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYSwvdEfeY
Shout-out to https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ and https://fanart.tv/ for high-quality album art to embed.
As someone responsible for setting the track naming policy originally at a big streaming company, I can't remember what the policy was. I know I would be called in all the time for crazy shit like Aphex Twin having just a page of equations as track names, or I seem to remember some album by Röyksopp that had just colors printed for the track names and no words. That stuff killed me.
Or the team doing all the ingestion being overworked minimum wage high school grads and suddenly an entire semi truck turns up and it's just palettes of CDs completely in many various East Asian languages.
If I had to do it over I would have two fields, one for whatever best represented what the CD says (and as someone below me points out, this was usually the publisher's artistic discretion and differed between the data they sent, the back of the CD, the track list printed on the CD and the liner notes) and I would have a separate field for Title Cased Titles.
Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 2 had a track listing that was 6 pie charts, one image per slice, 1 slice per track. I assume it came on 3 LPs, but I had the 2 CD version, and there were corresponding pie charts printed on the face up sides of the CDs... as if it made it any clearer.
I ripped them about 15 years ago and cddb came up with track names for them, matching the ones in its Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Ambient_Works_Volume_...). I wonder if we have any evidence that the mapping from tracks to images is remotely correct.
I came up with the first CD DB for Windows 95 just before it came out. I realized Media Player had an .ini file with the track names and so I had people on Usenet send me all their listings and would reintegrate it and publish it frequently for the first few weeks until I realized .ini files had a 64KB limit and that was the end of that.
If I did it again, which I have planned for a long time, I would require citations for every track listing. Sure, it's a big barrier, but it'd nice to get it right where possible. The primary citations would generally be to the album cover, but in cases like the Aphex Twin insanity, cites to things like interviews and label demo releases etc could definitely be valid.
> I know I would be called in all the time for crazy shit like Aphex Twin having just a page of equations as track names, or I seem to remember some album by Röyksopp that had just colors printed for the track names and no words. That stuff killed me.
More creative than a QA department.
> MusicBrainz's (former?) policy where everything must be Title Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve.
Is that why that happens? It was always a baffling thing to me and required manual correction (and is one of the sorts of errors that made MusicBrainz less useful).
Part of the difficulty is that artists/labels aren't always consistent about the formatting of song titles. Its not uncommon for the capitalization to vary between the back cover of the CD, the printing on the CD itself and the liner notes. And then you have variations between releases of the same CD, and digital releases where the file metadata, and the store listing, and the artist website also all vary. So I can't blame MusicBrainz for choosing to normalize by default. Ideally, you could use normalized case for the Recording and Work song titles, and then stylized for the Release song titles, but most people don't go to that level of detail when entering songs.
Oh, I understand the problem, and I don't blame them either. However, it is a part of why these services stopped being useful to me.
> policy where everything must be Title Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve
If the music artist decided how it should be on the CD sleeve, and you can show that, then you can go with that. But more often than not, the sleeve is done by the record company's graphic designers, not the music artist.
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Titles
> Album and song titles are often found in upper‐case on the back cover of CDs. For example, the album Songs of Love and Hate is written as “SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE” on the cover. This is usually the choice of a graphic designer, not the artist. So, instead of copying the title from the cover, we follow certain rules to capitalize a title.
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction...
> Error Correction: There are many cases of record companies incorrectly reproducing titles or even artist names, or breaking generally accepted rules of usage for stylistic purposes. In such cases it often makes sense to fix errors and standardize irregularities, valuing correct spelling, punctuation and grammar over faithfulness to the printed release cover.
> Artist Intent: Artists sometimes choose to present names and titles in ways that deliberately contradict the rules of the language they're in (e.g. unorthodox spellings) and/or the MusicBrainz Style Guidelines. To describe the way we handle such choices, we use the term "artist intent." The general idea is that if an artist intended something to be written in a special way, then MusicBrainz should follow that intent. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find out what an artist intended. If you want to claim that some deviation from the Style Guidelines should be considered artist intent, the burden of proof lies on you.
Seems reasonable. I'd think this should be pretty straightforward for songs new enough to be released online. If it's capitalized a certain way on Spotify, that's almost certainly what the artist intended.
I can't recall when something like that was enforced. Artistic intent is definitely something that editors and guidelines intend to preserve. Though in some cases it might be hard to determine if something is a mistake or intentional - there are incredibly weird releases.