Comment by qingcharles
3 days ago
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.