[mb-style] No mean (feat.)

[Chris B]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alexander Dupuy" <dupuy at cs.columbia.edu>
To: "MusicBrainz style discussion" <musicbrainz-style at musicbrainz.org>
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 2:11 AM
Subject: RE: [mb-style] No mean (feat.)


>> well presumably the title would be Gorillaz (feat. Shaun Ryder) :)
>
> I would hope that the default case would be for the title to be "DARE" and 
> the
> *artist* will be "Gorillaz (feat. Shaun Ryder)" - you were maybe thinking 
> this
> already without realizing it, since you used the artist name from the 
> example,
> rather than the track title...

sorry, yes, I meant it would be titled by the tagger as 'Gorillaz - DARE 
(feat. Shaun Ryder)

>> the thing is, (i imagine) feat. came about to add consistency to a lot of
>> tracks which are actually named (on the printed tracklisting) 'SongX
>> (featuring ArtistY)'. since then, we have the situation where users are
>> adding feat. artists if they feel it is useful info, which to be fair it
>> usually is.
>
> In most cases, what is printed on the liner notes etc. has the featured 
> artist
> listed with the artist rather than the title; MusicBrainz has 
> traditionally
> moved this information to the track title to avoid creating a million 
> variant
> artist entries, but this is actually rather unusual, and is often 
> confusing to
> new MB users (it's only MB junkies who have come to consider this "normal" 
> :-).

Hmm, that depends. If the (feat. x) is global to that release, then yes I'd 
agree. But if it's just for one track on an album, absolutely not! That 
would be a complete nightmare to work with in most MP3 software today. 
hardly anything is 'playlist' based anymore - tis all done on media librarys 
where you navigate (normally) to the artist you're after, then play from 
there - difficult if the artist is split up into a million (feat. x) 
varients!

>> personally, i'd prefer (feat. x) info to appear in the actual title field 
>> of
>> the file ONLY if it appears on the printed tracklisting
>
> Once the tagger can generate this information automatically from AR links, 
> we
> can, and should, eliminate (feat. X) from *all* titles and artist names.

Yeah, when I say file, I mean the mp3 file, post tagging. What MBz shows 
should just be the artist/track name, then all the AR data in...whatever 
format that's going to eventually get displayed as (the discogs way, 
hopefully!).

>> however that's probably something best left to user preference - eg check
>> boxes in tagger options - 'append guest artists to track name'
>
> I guess that some people might want that as an option, but the default 
> setting
> should be 'append guest artists to artist name', with another option to 
> just
> leave the artist and track title as-is.

I disagree. Again, for global (feat. x) credits, yeah sure, stick it in the 
artist. but for one offs in the middle of the album, nope! I guess it could 
be appended to artist in the case of a compilation appearence too, as for 
that you're going to be looking for the album rather than the artist, in 
your mp3 software of choice.

^ That IMO should be the default behaviour.

Cheers,
Chris B