Summary of Recent Mailing List Discussions, compiled by Matthias Friedrich (yalaforge) and Stefan Kestenholz (g0llum)
Too busy to keep up with the mailing lists? Try this summary! If people like these, they may become a regular feature (and probably get their own Blog category)
- Errors during FreeDB import
- AR instrument dropdown list improvements
- New release type request – ‘Demo’
- Album Languages and Scripts discussion
- AR Documentation
- Artists with ARs
- FreeDB interface
- Special countries for release dates
- EAN/UPC codes
- Miscellaneous
- Errors during FreeDB import
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teleGUISE posted a bug description which he says occurred several times
during data import from freedb. If one does a VA import and edits all the track
titles according to styleguide, this can take up quite some time.
If the above mentioned error occurs, and because the data held in the session
expires on the last page of the import, you have to start from scratch. He also came up with a possible reason for this weirdness. - AR instrument dropdown list improvements
-
Since the first posting about this, Stefan has already
developed a fully integrated solution, thanks tma and
DonRedman for support/suggestions. - New release type request – ‘Demo’
-
There seems to be no common understanding if such a release type
should be added to the list. DonRedman suggested to put
this information into the album annotation. - Album Languages and Script discussion
-
There was quite a heated dicussion in the IRC channel
what the album language attribute describes. if it’s the lyrics
or if it describes the language the titles
of the tracks are in. This question was now put on the
mb-users list by Orion (djkc), who disagrees with Dupuy’s POV. - AR Documentation
-
Matthew Exon and Don Redman continued to improve the AR documentation.
They created several new wiki pages and could certainly need some help
of people familiar with AR issues. - Artists with ARs
-
There was talk about the use of birth/death dates for fictional
characters like the Blues Brothers. Additionally, some people want to
flag certain group members as founding members and proposed changes
to the DB schema as well as a new link type. - FreeDB interface
-
Once again a FreeDB style interface to MusicBrainz was suggested.
Rob posted a response repeating the old and known arguments against it.
No action from our side seems to be required at this point. - Special countries for release dates
-
Adding a special release country for Europe was suggested, again. It
was pointed out that this might lead to people wanting more “special”
countries. It was also suggested to make the release country optional.
There seems to be no consensus and lots of different solutions, so
it is unclear what kind of changes are required/preferred. - EAN/UPC codes
-
Product codes had their semi-yearly reapparence. Things have changed
with AR allowing us to (ab)use albumurl links to store EANs/UPCs
as links to upcdatabase.com. Link editors should have a look at the
discussion. - Miscellaneous
-
Apart from the usual style questions, several new AR link types were
requested including mix/remix, chorus master and rap vocals. A process for incorporating suggestions for these is desperately needed.
MetaBrainz Blog 
Could you link the relevant threads to gmane or the mailinglist archives. That would make it a whole lot easier to read the whole discussion in case there is something interesting.
Other than that, a good idea. It makes my life a lot easier. 😉
And ofcourse, after posting that i noticed that the first half of the post had some links. but not the parts i wanted to read. Ah well..