[mb-users] Adding releases not yet released

[Chris B]

On 05/09/07, Philipp Wolfer <phw at rubyforge.org> wrote:
>
> 2007/9/5, Aaron Cooper <cooperaa at gmail.com>:
> > Looking back, I am not sure whether the release was added before or
> > after a torrent surfaced for the album.  If we can confirm the
> > tracklist with audio files before the official release date then I'm
> > okay with adding releases early (regardless of what I may have said on
> > past edits... we are always improving our voting/editing methods ;)
>
> I don't know, but as far as I remember there was already a torrent
> available in this case.
>
> I understand your position and I can imagine that we could indeed make
> this a condition for such edits. But I believe that we don't get any
> extra reliability by doing so. Audiofiles alone don't confirm a track
> list. The track list can change, the release date can change, there
> might be hidden bonus tracks - that all can happen no matter if we
> rely on an official track listing or a (leaked) promo release. For me
> that's pretty much the same.


with an audiofile release you end up with 3 possible scenarios:
- it's a direct copy from the official release
- it's a direct copy from a promo release, which is either different or the
same as the official release. it exists as a separate release, or separate
release event, respectively.
- it's some kind of 'fake' release. either it's made up of other tracks by
the right artist (maybe live versions) to represent a real release, or it's
some other band entirely. either way it still exists as a release on MBz,
just perhaps under a different artist, and maybe a bootleg if it's not just
a relabelled rip.

so there's no situation when you get a release that doesn't exist, because
at the end of the day it's always going to be a distributed release,
official, promo, bootleg or otherwise. to me that's 'reliable', if only at
the most basic of levels.

with an 'official tracklist' you end up with 3 different scenarios:
- it's fine. gets released exactly as promised with same tracklist/details.
- it's completely bogus. chinese democracy syndrome.
- it's fine but details are wrong. at the most fixable end of the scale, the
release date is wrong (simply gets corrected hopefully down the line), but
the worse case scenario is the tracklist is wrong, so it might look like a
'correct' release, just some weird version (plenty of these in MBz. most
often with bonus discs/CD-rom videos/bonus DVDs included in the main
tracklist)

the latter 2 bullet points are the most dangerous for MBz. these release are
nothing more than tracklistings, not releases, until proven to be. it's next
to impossible to prove something DOESN'T exist, so by adding these, no
matter what the source (i challenge anyone to find a reliable source of
pre-release tracklistings!), we risk introducing bad data to the database,
which is after all supposed to be one of 'releases'. 'freedb' syndrome...

that's the difference :) personally i'm happy to deal with both as i can
usually fix 'my' artists, but i certainly think the latter should be marked
in someway such that they can be easily deleted down the line if there is
doubt. the rules in the wiki that kuno mentions seem fine to me
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