[mb-users] songs vs. tracks

[Lukáš Lalinský]

On St, 2007-02-21 at 11:11 +0100, Bogdan Butnaru wrote:
> Hi! I think it's great that you're trying this.
> 
> If only we could choose any track for the "cover of" target and have
> the system pick the right one, it would be worth a try. But this is
> exactly the issue I'm worrying about: any enhancement of the database
> model towards NGS is a good thing, because even if it's incomplete, it
> only adds data. But it needs an accessible interface, and ARs are
> already a bit hard to work with, especially by beginners. How are we
> going to display all the entities in your schema on the site?

My idea is to completely eliminate track ARs, move them to song ARs and
make it transparent to users. So if you add an AR to track, it will
automatically pick the assigned song and add the AR to it. The only
problem is that new tracks would need to be assigned to songs manually.
It could do some guessing based on title, but I'd rather not do this.

This has many advantages:
 * no AR duplicates
 * no problems with deciding which track is "the earliest release"
 * it would actually decrease DB load, as the unused DB model that
allows a track to be linked to multiple releases can be removed
 * you can use AR to group e.g. parts of classical works, ...

There is only one disadvantage I can think of is that we would need to
remove some release-level ARs, like "<artist> composed <release>".

> There's another issue I have, but it's somewhat less important. It's
> mentioned on the wiki, but it's dismissed rather more quickly than I'd
> like: having several songs per track. It doesn't matter if it's a
> medley, multi-mix, hidden track or whatever. It would be very nice if
> we could represent this kind of things almost like an inner-tracklist.
>[...]

Medleys or mash-ups are a separate works, and should have their own
"song" entity with AR links to other "songs".

I'd like to ignore the DJ-mix or hidden track cases for now. I think
this problem should be solved on release--track level, not track--song.

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