Member
Posts: 12
Hello all. After some discussion in this error report (and a similar one here) sebcat suggested that I post my question here for further discussion--good suggestion! Sorry it's long, thread title is a fairly good TL;DR and if you don't want the context you can skip to the proposal.
Question at hand is when there is a first recording that is dated on the site, but the first release is not the same recording. As it happens, both cases here happen to be Nat King Cole, who recorded many tracks more than once, with his trio or with different orchestras (or both). And then there are many, many compilations out there, often with no indication which recording they include. I would imagine this is often the case though for artists with long careers and repertoire repetition.
In my case this is primarily a headache for musicbrainz edits, which is what made me into a SHS user in the first place--it has been very helpful matching recordings and works, and I link here as often as possible. Not that I'm trying to solve a MB problem with SHS (though imho everyone should use it as it's great for tagging), but all the cross-site collaboration in music history research is one of the reasons I love spending my time on it. I think the idea that as a non-participant geek listener you might wonder what recording you're listening to and be able to click through tags and versions and streams between MB, SHS, discogs with minimal effort is pretty great I find.
So, proposing: I think it would be useful to have some way to differentiate when the first-recording version doesn't match the first-release version (and, ideally, which one you're hearing if you play the linked stream, or include both if possible...) Again ideally, something stronger/clearer than free-text comments.
I understand that some policies are already in place, and not critiquing them or asking them to change. Just opening up the idea for discussion.