[mb-devel] Release date/locations

[Bogdan Butnaru]

On 5/2/07, Bogdan Butnaru <bogdanb at gmail.com> wrote:
> > From: Olivier <viapanda at gmail.com>
> > 1 - It would have to be done on a track by track basis, not release basis.
> > 2 - a track may be recorded on several days (multiple takes then
> > spliced), including for live that later receive an overdubbed part
> > 3 - such a "date" already implictely exists, as the engineer AR
> > (recorded by) is a temporal AR
> > 4 - other dates may be used on other engineer roles as well
> >
> > IMO, recording dates are intrinsically linked with "recorded by" AR,
> > and should be kept there.
>
> You're partly right, but the very fact that we have a huge guideline
> set dealing with how to enter release dates and locations in the title
> of (some) live releases is proof that that AR is not enough. It's a
> different matter, though it intersect it a bit. Also, consider that we
> have vastly more recording info in the LiveReleaseStyle format than in
> AR format. And that for most live releases there is no "recorded by"
> info. (We could use the band name, but that's a bit redundant, isn't
> it?)
>
> While I don't like the resulting duplication (though perhaps we could
> link the AR with the "recorded" line, as we link the labels with the
> "release" line), I doubt it'll be a huge problem.

And, of course, nothing prevents us to add a "recorded by" field in
the new table, and populate it with the current AR in that case.
(Except technical difficulty, of course.)

As for the other problems:
 * multiple dates: we could have two fields, so we can have both
"recorded on" and "recorded between"; one of them simply wouldn't be
used for the vast majority of recordings.
 * the by-track recording date might be useful, but consider the vast
difference in the volume of data; we currently have huge number of
bootlegs that make do just fine with just the release-title
hogde-pogde. Also, per-track info is only relevant in some cases. I
don't think it's worth it to complicate things with per-track
recordings. Instead, we can just add multiple recording lines for the
release (there's no possible different interpretation for that,
right?) and use the free-text comment field or the annotation to make
sense of the handful of more complicated things.

For instance, we could add "Recorded between [1994-03 and 1994-05] at
[the Music Studio, Town], [Country] by [someone]", with the comment or
annotation stating more info -- e.g. "track 1-5 on 7 March, track 6 in
several takes in April 5-15, finishing touches on May 19". The vast
majority of releases would use only a simple line like the release
dates today.

It's true that we could complicate this a lot with many complex cases,
but simply adding a new by-release field would be (in comparison) very
simple technically and conceptually and cover a huge amount of things.
We need a balance between complexity and rewards, and I think the
initial proposal (extended maybe with intervals and 'recorded by'
field) is a good balance between these.

-- Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.