[mb-users] Re: Clean vs. Explicit versions

[Chad Wilson]

Frederic Da Vitoria wrote:
> How is the presence of absence of beeping/squelching/silence/etc not a 
> rather audible difference between the two versions?  A 10 second 
> difference could simply be that the master was final mixed slightly 
> slower on one version of a CD release, etc.  The presence or absence 
> of beeps, blurps, squelches, silence, whatever, would seem at least 
> as, if not more, significant in differentiating the 2 releases as two 
> versions of the same release.  I've not seen the reverse addressed 
> though - why *should* the two versions be merged as a single listing?
>
>
>
> I agree this is not cool. I had issues with PUIDs being too 
> discriminant (I had different PUIDs for different compression levels 
> of the same tracks), now we seem to have not discriminant enough. 
> Maybe there is currently no better solution, but we must stay aware of 
> the problem.
That's exactly my point, I'm sure I've seen several occasions where the 
PUIDs have been the same for a clean vs. explicit track that has the 
same track length.

The problem with keeping multiple releases is that PUIDs and disc ids 
etc will /always/ be incorrectly attributed even if there is some funky 
annotation explaining it because very few users actually look at that 
info. It means you have two logical entities in theory, but you get a 
big mess of actual data relating to them making them essentially the 
same release after any period of time. That mess is difficult for anyone 
to clean up because the data is difficult to obtain reliably and few 
people have both copies.

Remember that for most of us arguing the "other way", our argument only 
applies if the track times are the same. The majority of clean vs. 
explicit versions around have differing track times and/or tracks 
anyway, and I don't think anyone would argue to keep those instances in 
a single release.