MusicBrainz and Discogs are wonderful resources, but I consider them complementary to FreeDB more than equivalent. They are based around the concept of a single canonical "correct" entry for everything, and their tag formatting guidelines are fundamentally at odds with many of my personal tagging preferences.
"Artists sometimes choose to present names and titles in ways that deliberately contradict the rules of the language they're in (e.g. unorthodox spellings) and/or the MusicBrainz Style Guidelines. To describe the way we handle such choices, we use the term 'artist intent.' The general idea is that if an artist intended something to be written in a special way, then MusicBrainz should follow that intent. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find out what an artist intended. If you want to claim that some deviation from the Style Guidelines should be considered artist intent, the burden of proof lies on you. A seeming error may be considered evidence of artist intent if it is consistently found on all of an artist's official releases. The best evidence would be a statement of intent by the artist (e.g. edit 6892422: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/6892422)."
Arguing with other music nerds on the Internet about which one of us has the Factually Correct Tags is not my idea of fun, and FreeDB avoids this problem by supporting multiple entries for any given disc. I totally understand how some people would consider that a burden, but I smile any time I get to choose from a few entries on FreeDB because one of them will always be substantially closer to my ideal. For me this usually manifests in ways such as (but not limited to):
- "Featured artists" in the title tag vs in the Artist tag (vs not listed at all?)
- "Year" tags when an album's slightly-staggered multi-region release overlaps a year boundary, or when a different label has re-released a bit-identical disc with packaging labeled a different year. I have that problem with a lot of my CDs from Sire or Tommy Boy Records where the post-1985 pressings are distributed under Reprise with a new date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_Records#Revival_and_Re...
- Title capitalization, my most frequent hassle. I have many CDs with track or artist names in ALL CAPS ENGLISH SHOUTING style. Super super common on Japanese releases, and both MB and Discogs used to have rules specifically banning anything except Camel Cased English Literary Title style.
"Although the Japanese script has no capitalization, it is very common for Japanese titles to contain words in other scripts. Japanese artists have a tendency to choose capitalization and punctuation for aesthetic reasons; and to be very consistent regarding case over all releases. For this reason, words in the Latin script on a Japanese release should be in the same case as on the album art if other available sources, such as official discography or record label pages, are consistent; not normalized according to English or other capitalization standards."
But then _that_ guideline rubs me the wrong way, implying "capitalization and punctuation for aesthetic reasons" is exclusive to one culture, and letting record labels and marketing materials override the artistic work itself. Here's an example from Scotland: bis' 2007 CD+DVD greatest hits release.
The FreeDB system we're losing allows me to share my tags alongside the Title Cased version, so everyone can be happy: https://i.imgur.com/xrFj66A.png
Obviously any metadata service at all is perfectly fine for the 99% of people who just want some idea of what song they're listening to, and I realize I'm making my life way more difficult than it needs to be by caring about this to the extent I do, but music is too important and personal of a thing for me to settle for 99%. In a world of otherwise constant chaos my music library is my one zen garden. The single thing I curate to something asymptotically approaching my concept of perfection. A more accurate log of my own feelings and experiences than any words. Replicating the FreeDB data on my local network wont be hard, and that database will undoubtedly serve me well for years as I discover different things new to me despite their chronological age, but we're losing something way more special here than just the data and a crusty old Perl CGI script.
> FreeDB avoids this problem by supporting multiple entries for any given disc.
FWIW, something somewhat similar to this will Soon™ be part of MusicBrainz too: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-4501 – you might want to read through there and maybe even put your own thoughts about what it can be used for in a comment on that ticket.
> MB […] used to have rules specifically banning anything except Camel Cased English Literary Title style
Just out of curiosity: When was this? I’ve been involved with MusicBrainz since summer of 2006 (ie., for over 10 years) and this hasn’t been the case for as long as I’ve been around.
I'm currently looking at becoming caretaker for a large number of people's music collections soon. I hear what you're saying about music being too important to settle for 99%. Hopefully I'll get things right enough.
I do love the formatting and structure of MB's Style Guidelines page, but it goes somewhere I dislike from the very first Principles page: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction...
"Artists sometimes choose to present names and titles in ways that deliberately contradict the rules of the language they're in (e.g. unorthodox spellings) and/or the MusicBrainz Style Guidelines. To describe the way we handle such choices, we use the term 'artist intent.' The general idea is that if an artist intended something to be written in a special way, then MusicBrainz should follow that intent. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find out what an artist intended. If you want to claim that some deviation from the Style Guidelines should be considered artist intent, the burden of proof lies on you. A seeming error may be considered evidence of artist intent if it is consistently found on all of an artist's official releases. The best evidence would be a statement of intent by the artist (e.g. edit 6892422: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/6892422)."
Arguing with other music nerds on the Internet about which one of us has the Factually Correct Tags is not my idea of fun, and FreeDB avoids this problem by supporting multiple entries for any given disc. I totally understand how some people would consider that a burden, but I smile any time I get to choose from a few entries on FreeDB because one of them will always be substantially closer to my ideal. For me this usually manifests in ways such as (but not limited to):
- Genre tags. According to Discogs half my CDs belong in a single bucked labeled "Folk, World, & Country" https://www.discogs.com/genre/folk%2C+world%2C+%26+country
- Use of Artist vs AlbumArtist
- "Featured artists" in the title tag vs in the Artist tag (vs not listed at all?)
- "Year" tags when an album's slightly-staggered multi-region release overlaps a year boundary, or when a different label has re-released a bit-identical disc with packaging labeled a different year. I have that problem with a lot of my CDs from Sire or Tommy Boy Records where the post-1985 pressings are distributed under Reprise with a new date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_Records#Revival_and_Re...
- Title capitalization, my most frequent hassle. I have many CDs with track or artist names in ALL CAPS ENGLISH SHOUTING style. Super super common on Japanese releases, and both MB and Discogs used to have rules specifically banning anything except Camel Cased English Literary Title style.
I say "used to" because they have both gotten better on that issue, but a good percentage of the older data was entered under the old Title Case Only guidelines and remains that way. For an example, compare the same album described on Musicbrainz https://musicbrainz.org/release/041f87d6-6583-42cd-8cf3-5f4a... versus on a fandom wiki https://remywiki.com/Beatmania_HIROSHI_WATANABE_beat_indicat...
This is the relevant Musicbrainz guideline that didn't used to exist: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Language/Japanese
"Although the Japanese script has no capitalization, it is very common for Japanese titles to contain words in other scripts. Japanese artists have a tendency to choose capitalization and punctuation for aesthetic reasons; and to be very consistent regarding case over all releases. For this reason, words in the Latin script on a Japanese release should be in the same case as on the album art if other available sources, such as official discography or record label pages, are consistent; not normalized according to English or other capitalization standards."
But then _that_ guideline rubs me the wrong way, implying "capitalization and punctuation for aesthetic reasons" is exclusive to one culture, and letting record labels and marketing materials override the artistic work itself. Here's an example from Scotland: bis' 2007 CD+DVD greatest hits release.
- Title Cased on Musicbrainz: https://musicbrainz.org/release/45a14f8d-687d-4309-aa83-1004...
- Title Cased on Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/Bis-We-Are-Bis-From-Glasgow-Scotland...
- obviously aesthetically lower-cased on the actual album I'm holding in real life: https://i.imgur.com/hlaIRHj.jpg
The FreeDB system we're losing allows me to share my tags alongside the Title Cased version, so everyone can be happy: https://i.imgur.com/xrFj66A.png
Obviously any metadata service at all is perfectly fine for the 99% of people who just want some idea of what song they're listening to, and I realize I'm making my life way more difficult than it needs to be by caring about this to the extent I do, but music is too important and personal of a thing for me to settle for 99%. In a world of otherwise constant chaos my music library is my one zen garden. The single thing I curate to something asymptotically approaching my concept of perfection. A more accurate log of my own feelings and experiences than any words. Replicating the FreeDB data on my local network wont be hard, and that database will undoubtedly serve me well for years as I discover different things new to me despite their chronological age, but we're losing something way more special here than just the data and a crusty old Perl CGI script.