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Topic: Proposed 'official' tags for album disambiguation (Read 2054 times) previous topic - next topic
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Proposed 'official' tags for album disambiguation

Everyone seems to use the MusicBrainz database today, a good thing. We all still have the problem of album disambiguation, though (think of Peter Gabriel, The Beatles, Weezer, …) which can be handled fine using the MusicBrainz release ID, but usually lacks a little support in creating nice file/path names to keep these separated.

Since I’m a strong believer in that everything important should be reconstructable from a file’s tags, I am currently proposing adding two new tags that could be officially supported by programs like MusicBrainz Picard, beets, Mp3tag, foobar2000 and others, to keep things in sync and make it easier for users:

Code: [Select]
'MusicBrainz Album Comment' (for ID3v2)
'----:com.apple.iTunes:MusicBrainz Album Comment' (for MP4)
'MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMCOMMENT' (for Vorbis Comments)
'MusicBrainz/Album Comment' (for ASF/WMA)
Code: [Select]
'MusicBrainz Release Group Comment' (for ID3v2)
'----:com.apple.iTunes:MusicBrainz Release Group Comment' (for MP4)
'MUSICBRAINZ_RELEASEGROUPCOMMENT' (for Vorbis Comments)
'MusicBrainz/Release Group Comment' (for ASF/WMA)

I invite you to take part in the discussion: Ticket PICARD-1617,  discussion on the beets forum and Mp3tag forum. It would be great if we could get something going that would also be supported by foobar2000!

N.B.: Picard supports these internally as %_relesecomment% and %_releasegroupcomment%, maybe the same variables could be used (probably without the leading "_")?

Re: Proposed 'official' tags for album disambiguation

Reply #2 –
I don't understand why the tags should have anything to do with MusicBrainz. If the purpose is only to differentiate albums from the same artist's identically named albums you can already do that with release date. If you wish to store the "Car", "Scratch", "Blue Album", "Green Album" designation I think MusicBrainz calls it Medium title. I personally store it in DISC TITLE tag field.

Re: Proposed 'official' tags for album disambiguation

Reply #3 –
"Medium title" is used when an album consists of more than one medium (i.e., CDs) that have their own titles (i.e. "Bonus CD: Live in Wacken"). This would not solve the problem of distinguishing albums of the same name.

The "Album Comment" and "Release Group Comment" are used to distinguish _different_ albums of the same name (like the Peter Gabriel albums: They are all called "Peter Gabriel" but totally different albums). And I have seen the case where adding the release year also didn’t help because two different,  identically named albums by the same artist were published in the same year.

Personally, I tend to use the "Release Group Comment" as an (additional) disambiguator, since it’s not that polluted with disambiguation comments as the "Album Comment" which often contains data like "Limited Digipak edition" or the like.

"MusicBrainz" because they invented it with the database, and their official tagger, Picard, already (partly) supports it.