[mb-users] Special characters in release titles

[Chris B]

2008/4/29 Gioele <gioele at svario.it>:
> Chris B wrote:
>  >>  Artist intent > consistent spelling and capitalisation > cover art
>  >
>  > seeing as it's near impossible to prove artist intent in such
>  > situations, you're better off trying to find 'consistant original
>  > data'. ie, you track down as many tracklistings (sourced from or
>  > copies of the sleeve) as possible
>  ...
>
> > correcting spellings has no use in itself - we're not a
>  > dictionary!
>
>  What is more consistant than the official spelling? In Italian we have
>  an "official" normative spelling and we should follow that for all the
>  Italian words (consistent spelling) unless the artist is using their
>  mistake in a deliberate way (artist intent, puns usually). What the cover
>  art and the other sites say is only the last resort. To go back to
>  the "Così fan tutte" example, *most* of the internet use the wrong spelling
>  and I suppose also many releases have a wrong title on their cover: only a
>  little percentage of people has an Italian keyboard and even fewer use the
>  char map or other means to input weird (to them) chars. But that does not
>  mean that we have to abandon the correct spelling just because many are
>  misspelling it. :)
>
>  Again, I'm referring to cases where a normative spelling of a word
>  exists, "perché" vs "perche", or an official name exist, "Così fan tutte"
>  vs all the misspelling you can find: "Cosi fan tutte", "Così fan
>  tute", "Cosí fan tutte", "Cose fan tutte", etc. In all the other case, i.e.
>  no artist intent and no standard spelling, let's follow the cover art, what
>  else?

i'm not sure what you mean  by 'standard' spelling. i'm talking about
correcting things to what they are in a dictionary of the language
used by the artist - this I don't agree with. like i said, consistent
original data is sometimes superseeded by artist intent, but it isn't
the same as artist intent. if something is spelt 'wrong' most of the
time on covers, then that spelling becomes the most useful to use.

a famous example of this are hendrix's 'foxy (foxey) lady' - this has
nothing to do with artist intent but everything to do with usability.
for that reason i disagree strongly with 'correcting' spellings unless
research has been done into the variations of the track to prove
ConsistentOriginalData. if the songs you are talking about are
classical or 'standard' songs then it's most likely that no release(s)
have 'ownership' of these titles so ConsistentOriginalData is
irrelevant, so corrections are most probably the thing to do.