Okay, this is probably a crazy idea, I've not even convinced myself, so feel free to shoot this down if you think of any flaws:

Idea

Does it make more sense to link a covered song to the song itself, or to the original artist?

Example, there are many versions of many different Beatles songs in the database. Does it actually add anything to link to a particular version of each song, above the information that it is a Beatles cover? Is it really a cover of a specific track on a specific CD or is it just a cover of that song as composed by the Beatles? And if you already know the name of the song from the cover track, do you really need to duplicate that info?

Problems

• covers that change the song name (relatively uncommon but known e.g. "He's Gonna Step on You Again" -> "Step On" by the Happy Mondays)

• by "linking to the artist", do you mean linking to the composer, or to the performer? If the former, IMHO it's a bad idea - as you actually loose a lot of information. If it's the performer, it's a bit better, but you still loose the information about the releases on which the original is to be found. All in all, this proposal doesn't make any new information available (both the composer and performer may be fetched of the cover target track), and actually looses some... -- dmppanda 2008-02-20 14:40:02

Discussion

• The current problem is that you usually end up with a link of something like "Hey Jude" is a cover of "Hey Jude". Not very informative, but that's a UI problem. I don't think linking to artists is a very good idea, because of the "Step On" problem. What would be nice would be a distinction between recordings and compositions. Covers could then link to compositions rather than recordings. --JohnCarter

  • IMO it's a great improvement, I'd love it! Even if the UI could be better, knowing that a track is a cover of a track is in fact a redundant but still quite useless info. Moreover, when I have to AR a cover I have the problem "Which Hey Jude do I have to choose, from which album?" But, most of all, if I think about tagging, I really like to have something like "Deep Purple - Hey Jude (Jimi Hendrix cover)" , now I have to put it by hand after MBTagger passes. (The only thing stops me it's how to wrote AR on the Artist side...) --ClutchEr2 - it was me but I'm not the one who wrote this page; and btw I meant "Hey Joe"

    • You can already legitimately link covers to their original artists, using the ComposerRelationshipType. (Though of course this really would link "Hey Jude" to Lennon/McCartney, not The Beatles). I'd guess that eventually the tagger will allow you to include whatever strings you want into the tags (In your file), so if you wanted you could add the composer to every track name. --JohnCarter

:::: IIRC (and I think I do) the database does actually allow the state that one track can be on more than one album at the same time, altough the UI does not allow this yet, IIRC this is FutureWork to be implemented, and these AR's would be *merged* in that case, so you *would* have one definitive 'Hey Joe' track, and all instances of the original of that track would *be* the same track, thus all instances of the same cover of that track would be the same and it would all only need *one* AR link. Remixes, extended versions, remastered and the ilk would be considered different versions and not be linked. (one the day of track merging is a possibility we will sure have a lot more to argue about 'this track is such and such different than this track and so etc' but I think that that will solve this problem. ~mo

CategoryHistory CategoryProposal CategoryDiscussion - Original author: Who was it?