[mb-style] Video tracks on AVCD:s -- [data track] or something else?

[Philip Jägenstedt]

Hi all,

Recently I've come across a few AVCD:s, i.e. discs with mixed music
video and audio tracks. This format seems to be fairly common in
China/Asia. Here are 3 releases which all handle the situation
differently:

http://musicbrainz.org/release/6edba6ec-8c61-408f-9f1d-431af93ccada.html
http://musicbrainz.org/release/16305cf7-517c-4052-86c0-d97c7992c3f5.html
http://musicbrainz.org/release/8f6228a0-07f1-42e9-9630-6498a0d34ac6.html

The last 2 are edited by me, and as you can see I haven't been
consistent. I'm sure there are other releases like this in the
database.

How should we handle this? An easy answer is [data track] because they
contain "data". My main problem with this is that it isn't data in the
same sense as normal mixed mode CD:s where a [data track] is a
filesystem to be read by a computer.

Also, given that we allow VCD:s and DVD:s to be entered with "proper"
titles, it would seem a bit strange to mangle them here -- an AVCD is
as much a VCD as it is a CD.

Possible solutions:

1. Enter the name of the music video without any special formatting
and note in an annotation which tracks are video and which are audio.
This is consistent with VCD:s but gives bogus track times and possibly
a great deal of confusion.

2. Mandate a standard suffix, like (music video). This would be easier
to identify/translate/remove for a tagger. Perhaps better (video)
doesn't make the assumption that it's music and would work for short
behind the scenes clips and similar which are certainly on some AVCD
out there.

3. Use [something in brackets] to mark that the track is "special".
I'm not a fan of this (even though I made such a edit myself), as it
would cause trouble for someone tagging their music videos with
MusicBrainz (which is increasingly probable with modern video formats
supporting such metadata and modern hardware (e.g. iPod) actually
using it.

Any other ideas?

No apologies to those that think that the tagging issues have nothing
to do on MB-Style ;)

-- Philip (foolip)