[mb-users] Artist sort names for non latin scripts

[Lauri Watts]

n 9/11/07, Philip Jägenstedt <philip at foolip.org> wrote:

> This may have to wait until NGS, but it would make sense to simply
> have one artist for each variant name and have
> translation/transcription ARs between them. Ideally the artist name
> would also have a language/script so that taggers could automatically
> choose a better alias.
>
> Are there any moved to solve this problem on the way? In the meantime,
> what would you like to be done for Chinese artist sort names? I've
> actually changed a few sort names from the widely known English to the
> correct but never heard of romanization, but have stopped because I
> can't imagine it makes anyone happy.

Ahh, what you're missing really, is that we're coercing the sortname
data for non-latin artist names, into doing an entirely different job,
and that job is in fact to cope with people who simply can't use the
original language/script name, no matter how correct it is.

Bear in mind everyone isn't utf-8 enabled yet, and even those who are,
can't necessarily read a name in Chinese or Japanese or Russian.  I
can sound out enough cyrillic to fiure out who Борис Александрович
Чайковский is, but I'd rather have it tagged as Tchaikovsky anyway,
because sounding out names to figure out what music to queue up isn't
all that practical.  I realise Chinese name sorting is quite
different, but my English language software (itunes, amarok) tends not
to care and will shoehorn it into whatever best fits, which is either
reverse the artist name via an algorithm, or use the sortname id3 tag,
and sort directly on that.

Picard already uses the sortname as the artist name for people who
can't/don't want to have their music tagged in non latin scripts helps
clarify things.  My personal rules of thumb, go pretty much like this,
in order of precedence:

* Any English name they've actually had on the cover of an album,
especially if it's a re-issue of a native language album (if they
release _different_ albums in English, and it does happen, that might
even merit two artist entries and separate discographies.  See Utada,
for instance; her English language album has never been released with
her full japanese name on it, and it's even a different style of music
to that she releases in Japan.  But she's a bit of an exception, and
it's really only in those cases I would go for splitting the
discography.
* Any other 'official' English name provided by the artist (many
artists have an English translation of at least a bio page on their
site - what do they call themselves there?)  Check label sites too, if
they're on branch of a major label, there is often an English bio
there.
* Common English name (many artists have enough mentions in English
language press that you can see enough of a pattern to pick out one
spelling as 'more common')
* A transliteration, if none of the above can be found.

All that said, I mostly only haul out these rules of precedence when
I'm trying to decide how to vote on an edit changing the name from one
of the above to the other.  An edit history check on the person doing
the edit is usually revealing, someone mass editing a bunch of
artists, probably didn't check for 'a more official name', whereas an
engaged and active fan of the band, probably does, and can cite a
source if you ask them.

Duplicating the entire discography of Tchaikovsky though, in order to
deal with it, is kinda overkill, I think.  The current situation,
while not perfect, will probably tide us over until NGS provides a
better alias system.

-- 
Lauri "I tried to keep this short..." Watts