How do you tag album editions?

General Discussion
1

Hi, first post here but long-time Mp3Tag user and thus lurker of this forum.
My question today, or rather the debate I'm trying to start is concerning album titles / editions / years / and so on. Let me illustrate with an example : I'm tagging an album I've just downloaded (legally of course), The Final Chapter by Polish band Filth of Mankind. It appears that there are 14 songs in front of me rather than the 8 I see on RateYourMusic for the physical releases. So, what do I do with that? what would you?

  • Would you use the "album" tag to show that the edition you have is particular? Like in my example by filling it as "The Final Chapter [2024 remastered - bonus tracks]"?
  • Then, which information should appear there, which shouldn't? The tag could be as big as "The Final Chapter [Bonus Tracks, Digital file, Remastered, 2024]", or as as small as "The Final Chapter (2024)".
  • Alas, if you scrobble your songs in anyway at all, the app will read the "album" tag and might not interpret it correctly, as you could potentially write a multitude of different things in it. There won't probably be any correspondence in the database of Lastfm, etc. of the album as you've tagged it, therefore filling it with redundant / "wrong" information (this will be public, anyone could browse the albums of Filth Of Mankind and see a list of The Final Chapters even though they technically made only one).
  • Would you use in this situation another tag to discriminate between editions at all? Maybe use "album" as a placeholder that would only read in my example "The Final Chapter" and something like "origalbum" for your own use on your own player (so you know that you're listening to specifically)?
  • Did you create your own tag, maybe like "albumedition"?
  • Should therefore original releases have any specific information in their tags stating such?

And, on the more "philosophical" side of things :

  • Do you even care about that? Should I talk to my doctor about being too much of a nerd?
  • Which information do you prioritise when tagging music? Which are more important to you? Is it the physical form of the file (original vs. remastered as they have different waves)? The "intellectual creation" so you wouldn't discriminate between songs versions but rather between albums (especially those who "tell a story") like add a "bonus track" to a specific edition? The "artist side of things" vs. "the distributor side".
  • What about the "year" tag? Or the "cover" one? In your collection, do they reflect the original creation as it was first released or the one of the specific file you've tagged?
  • To summarise, which information do you care about when listening to a song?

All of this is pretty daunting, especially since many albums have had a myriad of editions throughout the years and that I haven't made my own mind about any of this.
To further illustrate, let's say I want to listen to "The Queen Is Dead" by The Smiths. I would want to know that this is music from 1986 but also that they are remastered, and that this is the remaster of 2008 and not the one from 2019 (they might be the same, idk, this is for the example). I would love to see the original artwork (which is greenish when the CD in my hand is different) etc.
So, what's your own take about all of this?

2

I try to get as close as possible to the downloaded album.
In your example for The Smiths and "The Queen is Dead" I search only for the matching album or use one of the existing web sources scripts:

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Then I check and compare:
Is it a CD? Or "12" Vinyl LP"?
Does it have 10 or 23 or more tracks?
Does it have a unique barcode or catalog# or any other uniquely identifying info?

If the online sources like MusicBrainz or Discogs does not have a specific album, I search the closest one (Year, number of Tracks, Country, Media...)

Most online sources also have additional informations like "green vinyl" which can be tagged as SUBTITLE or something like this. All other informations (Barcode, Catalog number, Label etc.) I can get from the source. In the best case a web source script tags my album nearly automatically for me.

3

This will never work in an automated way.
IMHO every release has exactly one matching artwork.
The fundamental question is:
How much time do you have and how much time do you want to spend on such edge cases?

4

This is a tough choice for those of us that have OCD about our collections. Especially in cases where you may own any or all of these various editions that may have differing release years or track lists. But at his is your personal library so it is ultimately up to you to handle it to suit your preference. And also to work with your player of choice.

This is exactly how I do it, a suffice that shows the year and kind of release other than for the original. Something like [2024 Remaster] or [Deluxe] for example.

This goes back to your software requirements. If scribbling and statistics are important to you, then you have to keep that in mind when editing your metadata.

Custom tags are rarely used in players so keep that in mind if this information is an important factor for you when browsing.

In order to browse by decades I have found the year field needs to show the original year of the release. There is a separate ORIGYEAR field but no player I have used looks at this. Some have swapped the purpose in my case to at least keep the rerelease date available.

I have, but he said my condition was pretty much hopeless! :rofl:

5

I would add: how do I access the albums in everyday life? Will I be able to get the various editions together if I add various details to the album? Does this ease the way to play the files from an album or doesn't it? Which of the additional data does my player support?
It will be a compromise in the end.

6

You are right, and there's also the question of who will see / access the information I enter in Mp3Tag. For the sake of the discussion, how have you personally answered such questions? How does it translate in tagging?

That's one way to answer that, and therefore since there might be different artworks for the same oeuvre (depending of the format, if it's a re-release or original, etc.) am I right in assuming that you would tag your files according to the physical object rather than music itself? For example with such a release - sorry I know there are better examples but can't think of one at the moment - that has three different cover art for the same songs, would you tag your files under "album" such as "Die Berge [limited vinyl edition]" to match the particular artwork? I'd love to learn how you to this.

This is an important point considering the addition of esoteric tags or creating new ones (which I've heard is possible...). But then, as you said, one might own different versions of the same album which makes it difficult to keep up with scrobbling and / or statistics. Like, in a stretched example, there's only one band called "The Jimi Hendricks Experience", isn't there? But Lastfm, lists as much as 15 of them because of played tags : https://i.imgur.com/HlsBfSt.png. As for stats, you mind end up with a situation like :

  • Run-DMC - It's Like That / Played 7 times
  • Run-DMC - It's Like That / Played 4 times

While looking at your most played songs, even though the two songs are sonically the same but one is from "Run-D.M.C. [1984 Vinyl US]" and the other from "Run-D.M.C. [1986 CD EU]".
Once again, as you stated, this is completely personal. Hence why this post was aimed at exchanging opinions / ways of tagging rather than asking "how to...". So, how do you approach this, especially as "one of those of us that have OCD" ^^?

I'm anxious about giving mine too much work if I start to get into this ^^. But I must say that I've spent the afternoon with these questions and the best answer I have now is "I should make my own foobar2000 skin" even though I've never used this player before ahah, so there's that ^^.

7

I know there's a really tiny chance that someone would have in their collection both these albums since they are sonically similar as well as have the same tracks, as far as I know but well... that was an illustration :sweat_smile:

8

I tag all my tracks from the same album with the same cover artwork.
So it depends on which album I own from this three:

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The only exception are compilations like "UK Top 40".
On such compilations every track has its own (mostly Single) cover artwork.
But to be honest:
I don't search for them. If they are there already embedded: Fine.
If not, I set the same "UK Top 40-Collection" cover art work to all the 40 tracks at once.

9

I am sure there are many examples where collectors would have several different releases of an album. Remasters may (or may not) have improved sonic mixing, additional songs, demos, and/or live releases, and possibly even whole additional discs added.

Even when scrobbling, some may prefer to know exactly which album version was listened to, others just want the high level info of the main release. Again it really comes down to personal choice and what your player(s) can do.

10

I've personally chosen to add such information to the album tag when I started to collect music digitally 18ish years ago. At that time, the support for tags like DISAMBIGUATION where MusicBrainz often stores information such as "Deluxe Edition" or "20th Anniversary Remaster" either did not exist yet or the popular players I used at the time did not support them (or I simply did not know about them, I was a kid and a noob). But every player I used did support the ALBUM tag, so that's what I used.

Another related pickle are SUBTITLE, DISCSUBTITLE and SETSUBTITLE. Even today, the support for these fields is usually not present in most players out of the box (however you can often add it to sophisticated players at the price of more RAM usage and longer scan times). So I also added them to the album tag back then.

This resulted in monstrosities like:

Brothers and Sisters (Super Deluxe Edition) [CD 1] Remastered
Brothers and Sisters (Super Deluxe Edition) [CD 2] Rehearsals, Jams, and Outtakes
Brothers and Sisters (Super Deluxe Edition) [CD 3] Live At Winterland, 26.9.73
Brothers and Sisters (Super Deluxe Edition) [CD 4] Live At Winterland, 26.9.73

Upside:

  1. Since it's all in the album tag, every player displays all the information with minimal or no configuration required.
  2. Since the albums are split per disc, you can store an individual cover per disc folder without having to embed them in the files.

Downsides:

  1. As you said, scrobbling doesn't work properly for files that are tagged this way and LastFM often recommends me albums I've already listened to.
  2. Mixing different pieces of information (album, edition, disc number and disc-/setsubtitle) in one field calls for manual work or extremely sophisticated regexes + actions if you still want to be able to quickly mass edit your tags.
  3. Albums are split per disc in most players and you cannot start playing an entire multi-disc album with one click.
  4. Players that do support the niche tags can display information twice, once in the ALBUM tag and once as the tag the information belongs into.

The year tag is also tricky. Technically, YEAR should contain the release year of the edition while ORIGYEAR should hold the recording/first release year. Usually, players only support the YEAR tag tho, so many people chose to ignore the ORIGYEAR tag and set the recording/first release time to the YEAR tag or swapped their usage. Some people also set the day and month of the release to the DATE tag.
I usually only care about the YEAR tag and populate it with the original recording/release year and when the edition is the 2018 Remaster for example, that's noted in the album tag by appending " (2018 Remaster)".

However these decisions are old enough to vote and a lot has changed in the mean time. If I had to choose today, I wouldn't do it this way.

There are many players that give you finegrained control over how they display obscure or even custom tags so if you want to go full OCD and populate DISAMBIGUATION, SUBTITLE, SETSUBTITLE, DISCSUBTITLE, YEAR, ORIGYEAR, DATE and also add all the musicbrainz tags + custom tags, you can do that and still use your library in multiple different players (if you configure every player to utilize these fields). Depending on how well you can use variables and scripting, this might prove to be difficult.

On Windows, MusicBee (among others) allows this level of configuration. For Android I'd suggest using lms as the server since that neatly integrates with MusicBrainz and supports many niche tags. You can then use lms as the provider for Symfonium, which approaches a similar level of customizability as MusicBee and performs extremely well with huge libraries.

Another pain point are album collections like "5 Original If Albums". Do you tag these as "5 Original If Albums [CD 1] If" to retain the information that they stem from a collection or do you tag each of the discs as if it was the original album that the disc contains? Do you give each of them the Year the collection was released or the original release date of the album that disc 1 contains?

Some people mix things and choose to store such albums in a folder structure that reflects the collection:
5 Original If Albums\CD 1 - If\
while tagging the individual discs as if they were the original releases.

As far as I know there is no "perfect" or "commonly accepted" solution for many of these problems. You just have to decide how you'd like to see them handled in your own collection and try to find ways that minimize the manual work you have to put into achieving your chosen solution.

Once you've settled on a solution, you're pretty much stuck, depending on how large your library is and how much work you're willing to put into changing your mind later on. At almost 300.000 scrobbles I'd break the playcount syncing for a huge part of my library if I suddenly "fixed" the tags of my files to clean up the ALBUM in favor of DISAMBIGUATION, SUBTITLE, DISCSUBTITLE, SETSUBTITLE and so on.
I could use a whole lot of regex and time to edit the lastfm DB to also clean up past scrobbles (requiring a pro account), but that would be a huge undertaking and prone to errors.
I might undertake this eventually when SSDs that can fit my entire library don't cost me a kidney.
Today I'd stick to the rule that only 1 piece of information belongs into 1 field. It might be convenient to "just edit the album", but untangling unrelated information later on is painful if you aren't well versed in using regular expressions.
It's infinitely more easy to edit the display of the album field from (pseudocode):
%ALBUM%
to (pseudocode):

%ALBUM%{if disambiguation: (%DISAMBIGUATION%)}{if disctotal > 1: [CD %DISCNUMBER%]}{if subtitle: %SUBTITLE%}

once per player than altering possibly tens of thousands of files so that the content of ALBUM holds that mixed bag of information. Every change down the line becomes complicated and error prone as soon as you start mixing fields.

So to sum up: Don't mix fields, you can use DISAMBIGUATION (or another or even a custom tag) for the edition, YEAR/ORIGYEAR/DATE for the release/recording year/date and SUBTITLE/DISCSUBTITLE/SETSUBTITLE for other additional information. As long as you use players that allow advanced configurations, you're pretty much free to settle on whatever scheme you like.

11

The Navidrome music server in the latest release uses a tag albumversion for this. I hope other players will catch up and adopt this practice.

It also recognizes the tag musicbrainz_albumcomment (which AFAIK beets fills with the disambiguation comment from MusicBrainz).

See also Release v0.55.0 · navidrome/navidrome · GitHub