[mb-style] Bach passions and CSG

[Paul C. Bryan]

Disclaimer: I'm a relative newcomer to classical and opera styles within
MusicBrainz.

I guess my first question is, if I were to happen to purchase this
release, and put it on my MP3 player, would I have enough context when I
see "93. Chori: Wahrlich, dieser ist Gottes Sohn gewesen" to know this
is from Bach's St. Matthew Passion? Would I know especially if I was new
to the work?

As a relative newcomer, one of the reasons I have embraced
ClassicalStyleGuideline and OperaTrackStyle is the fact that most music
players are braindead when it comes to displaying useful information
about the track they're playing, and MusicBrainz has (intentionally or
inadvertently) addressed this with its current style guidelines.

I guess my second question is, should MusicBrainz be trying to
compensate for crappy music players, or should it be aiming to provide a
decently normalized data structure that can be adapted to braindead
music players through tagging software? I personally think the latter.

Maybe works could help get us out of such a debate to some extent if we
could begin to attach information to the work, and leave the redundant
information out of the individual movements or arias. If that's not
currently in the works, then it's something I'd certainly support seeing
in the future.

However, until we have a more robust data structure to store such
information, my vote would be on supporting the ClassicalStyleGuideline
and OperaTrackStyle, even if it results in increasing the size of track
titles.

BTW, personally when I am tagging a release that exclusively
encapsulates an artist's classical/opera work, I tend to remove the
redundant information from my own track title tags, because my music
player is not braindead and I don't want to see the redundant
information during playback.

Disclaimer: The words of the writer above is from a relative newcomer to
classical and opera tagging in MusicBrainz. Pregnant women, the elderly,
and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to his opinions.
This newcomer may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds. Do not taunt
this newcomer.

On Fri, 2008-03-21 at 00:17 +0100, Leiv Hellebo wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> Easter time is Bach passion time for me - especially since the flu 
> prevents my family from going skiing :(
> 
> So, I just spent the last hours adding a new recording of the St. 
> Matthew Passion.
> 
> This has 101 tracks played in about 161 minutes, and 25 tracks are less 
> than half a minute, 13 last for less than 15 seconds. Because of this, 
> it's imperative that the most important parts of the movement title 
> sticks out properly from the track titles.
> 
> So, I thought, how can this best be done?
> 
> I ended following the booklet, and the tags provided by the label (it's 
> a download). In the process I radically downplayed the common stuff that 
> we pad the titles with (work names and part indication), and ended up with:
> 
> http://musicbrainz.org/release/92fa1794-7a7e-48cd-a322-10a5def12cf1.html
> 
> (reference: http://www.linnrecords.com/recording-matthew-passion.aspx)
> 
> Now I don't want to start another quarrel, and I didn't really want to 
> start another discussion on keeping out the WorkName from titles just 
> yet, but I had time to add this now, so....
> 
> thoughts?
> 
> 
> leivhe
> 
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