4 ms·

This reminds me of MusicBrainz, whose database stores "release groups", e.g. the album Nevermind by Nirvana is one, which can have hundreds of "releases", as di

This reminds me of MusicBrainz, whose database stores "release groups", e.g. the album Nevermind by Nirvana is one, which can have hundreds of "releases", as different media (tape, CD, LP, promo, ...), different countries, later re-issues, etc. [0] Sometimes these have different catalogue numbers or barcodes to distinguish them, sometimes they don't but they're still different. I've seen releases where the only difference is the label in the centre of the LP, or the back of the CD case has a two-column tracklisting vs a one-column tracklisting. Music publisher uses the same code and says it's identical and yet it's clearly not. Then there's the "recordings" on an album, which even if they're never re-recorded can still end up chopped up, bleeped or remastered. They're not the same sound. MusicBrainz likes to track when they are exactly the same recording (e.g. the LP recording of a song appearing on a compilation album verbatim) and when they're not (e.g. radio edits of the LP recording). And if we're going beyond recordings by one artist of "their" song, i.e. cover versions, or just plain standards, those are "works", with composers, lyricists, and can be recorded thousands of times by different artists... I greatly appreciate the pedantry and flexibility for noting down when creative works are the same versus where they differ, in relational database form. [0] https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/1b022e01-4da6-387b-8658-8678046e4cef https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/1b022e01-4da6-387b-865...

SamWhited 8mo ago
They actually have a (very new, still alpha, probably not a ton of data yet) database for books: https://bookbrainz.org/about https://bookbrainz.org/about I haven't looked into what their schema is like, but if it's anything like Musicbrainz it will be pretty comprehensive and easy to pull the data you want out of!
- NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
  That's the post I made on r/plex a decade ago that pissed off a dumbass moderator and got me banned from there! I guess he hated books. I've recently been doing data entry on Open Library... sometimes even worldcat doesn't have an OCLC for an edition, and Open Lib is my fallback. Maybe I should be doing it on Bookbrainz instead.
  - pwdisswordfishy 8mo ago
    OpenLibrary is such an unfortunate case of semi-failure. It hasn't failed exactly (it's still around), and there's enough of a heartbeat that people can claim that it's going strong and there's nothing wrong (especially stakeholders closest to the chest who are least likely to stomach criticism). But its scope is both exactly what I want for a hypothetical book-related IMDB-like platform, and the same time it's not at all something that I use with any regularity that leaves me feeling that it has been helpful for the task at hand and thinking, "It's a good thing it exists." At this point, it's probably a bad thing that it exists, because if it didn't exist and you were trying to describe how you wish there was a good site that was like an IMDB for books that was editable like Wikipedia, then they couldn't say, "There is! It's called OpenLibrary", or dismiss your criticism by telling you that whatever is wrong with it you can help fix because it's both editable and the code is all open source.
bombcar 8mo ago
I know that for a book I've published via Kindle Press (the real ones, not digital) that there are at least 3 official revisions, and many many minor ones that as far as I know are only differentiated by the minor typos fixed, and MAYBE one of the numbers buried in the front matter. The ISBN has remained the same.
- jll29 8mo ago
  Converse problem: ISBN re-use: "Officially, ISBNs should never be reused. However, problems can happen if: - A publisher improperly reuses an ISBN - A small or self-publisher mis-registers a book - An ISBN agency error occurred - A book was published before 2007 and conversion from ISBN-10 to ISBN-13 created confusion" [Source: ChatGPT] In 2009, I had plans to use ISBNs to distinguish the books in my personal library. But after scanning some ISBN bar codes with a MacBook app, I discovered some codes were associated with different books (the app also pulled the cover art, so it was easy to spot). Never had the time to find out if the bar code scanning was defective (=did not use the check sum) or these were cases of assignment errors, which "shouldn't happen" but have already happened. There is a certain type of ignorant developer who reused "unique IDs", I've even seen a database in production use where GUIDs were recycled (no joke).
  - joemi 8mo ago
    Regarding your issues with ISBNs in your personal library, I suspect you must either have had an issue with your lookups/app, or you had several books from a (almost certainly tiny/amateur) publisher who improperly reused ISBNs. I've spent some time working at a bookstore with 80,000+ different ISBNs and I can count the number of issues with ISBN re-use we encountered on one hand. We'd put pricing barcodes on every book in the store, and those were always based on the ISBNs and had the titles and authors printed on them, which was info that came from ISBN lookups either from Bowker's Books-In-Print data or Ingram's data. We'd print the barcodes in large batches and then have to match them to the books based on the title and author shown and verify with the ISBN, so all 80,000+ were checked, and the actual ISBN issues were _extremely_ rare and always from a _very_ small/amateur publisher.
makr17 8mo ago
My favorite example of this sort of thing has been In My Tribe by 10000 Maniacs. The UPC/Catalog Number remained the same between the 1987 release and the removal of Peace Train (track 7) in 1989. I have this memory of sifting through the stock at a large used CD store in the mid-90s hoping to find the pre-removal version.
- amiga386 8mo ago
  https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/94d44c63-7dee-3921-aa6e-b28b27753cfa https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/94d44c63-7dee-3921-aa6... all with the barcode 075596073820 and catalogue number 60738 / 60738-2 / 9 60738-2 Interesting to read that the reason for the removal was Cat Stevens' apparent endorsement of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. It seems it was the band themselves that requested it? https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/cat-stevens-breaks-his-silence-202844/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/cat-stevens-br...
ggm 8mo ago
I had a dual CD pressing of Bach (double violin concertos plus some other stuff, Zuckerman/Perlman, Colombia passed through a number of subsequent buyouts and re-releases) which simply would not index correctly from the cd-id track stuff. I wound up making an account, uploading the info, managing the 29 different reasons a neophyte makes a mistake causing their data not to be accepted, and finally got my CD into the system. This included using a random chinese persons web from the 90s who presumably had come to Australia and bought the identical pressing which appears to be a hyper-local market specific variant of the ones which other (European, American) markets got. I have massive sympathy for the brainz, because as this article on ISBN and my experience shows, people are cavalier about renewing their 'unique identity' info, when they think they don't have to.
wink 8mo ago
This is kinda topical for me as I just scanned some barcodes off some CDs and my results were: 90-95% detection rate on MusicBrainz, and for the rest it ranged from "yeah, this is clearly the same thing with 10 tracks" to "oh my, there are 7 different regional versions with 10, 11, 12, 13, 13 tracks and I need to pay attention to grab the correct one so the last 3 songs are not wrong" and "this is some 5 EUR sample from an unknown label and really hard to find. Or their docs are not great, I had wished for something like "artist of track 1 = X and artist of track 2 = Y" that probably would have narrowed it down the most.
- amiga386 8mo ago
  When digitising my collection and using MusicBrainz as the main source of metadata, I had to add about 50 albums nobody had entered before. It has a huge amount of stuff - it already had 95% of my collection - but it's not perfect. The best way to distinguish an album (after barcode or name/artist, and medium) is number of tracks, and if that's not enough, release year/country. I got my metadata by using their Picard tagger and the CD TOC (as it contains the number and lengths of tracks, it's much less ambiguous), but of course opening every case and putting every CD in the drive is a lot more effort than barcode scanning. You can use the advanced search syntax if you need to look up multiple fields at once. https://musicbrainz.org/search https://musicbrainz.org/search -> Type "Release", method "Indexed search with advanced query syntax" For example: barcode:075596073820 AND tracks:11 gives https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=barcode%3A075596073820+AND+tracks%3A11&type=release&limit=25&method=advanced https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=barcode%3A075596073820+... Docs: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Indexed_Search_Syntax https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Indexed_Search_Syntax
cedws 8mo ago
I worked on a project recently to organise my music and came across MusicBrainz. I wanted a reliable API to enrich my music with the proper metadata, but unfortunately the majority of my tracks weren’t in their database at all. Maybe the Anna’s Archive Spotify data will help there. To me it makes the most sense to index music by its fingerprint. Releases, EPs, etc should just be pointers to that.

SamWhited 8mo ago

They actually have a (very new, still alpha, probably not a ton of data yet) database for books: https://bookbrainz.org/about https://bookbrainz.org/about I haven't looked into what their schema is like, but if it's anything like Musicbrainz it will be pretty comprehensive and easy to pull the data you want out of!

NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
That's the post I made on r/plex a decade ago that pissed off a dumbass moderator and got me banned from there! I guess he hated books. I've recently been doing data entry on Open Library... sometimes even worldcat doesn't have an OCLC for an edition, and Open Lib is my fallback. Maybe I should be doing it on Bookbrainz instead.
- pwdisswordfishy 8mo ago
  OpenLibrary is such an unfortunate case of semi-failure. It hasn't failed exactly (it's still around), and there's enough of a heartbeat that people can claim that it's going strong and there's nothing wrong (especially stakeholders closest to the chest who are least likely to stomach criticism). But its scope is both exactly what I want for a hypothetical book-related IMDB-like platform, and the same time it's not at all something that I use with any regularity that leaves me feeling that it has been helpful for the task at hand and thinking, "It's a good thing it exists." At this point, it's probably a bad thing that it exists, because if it didn't exist and you were trying to describe how you wish there was a good site that was like an IMDB for books that was editable like Wikipedia, then they couldn't say, "There is! It's called OpenLibrary", or dismiss your criticism by telling you that whatever is wrong with it you can help fix because it's both editable and the code is all open source.

bombcar 8mo ago

I know that for a book I've published via Kindle Press (the real ones, not digital) that there are at least 3 official revisions, and many many minor ones that as far as I know are only differentiated by the minor typos fixed, and MAYBE one of the numbers buried in the front matter. The ISBN has remained the same.

jll29 8mo ago
Converse problem: ISBN re-use: "Officially, ISBNs should never be reused. However, problems can happen if: - A publisher improperly reuses an ISBN - A small or self-publisher mis-registers a book - An ISBN agency error occurred - A book was published before 2007 and conversion from ISBN-10 to ISBN-13 created confusion" [Source: ChatGPT] In 2009, I had plans to use ISBNs to distinguish the books in my personal library. But after scanning some ISBN bar codes with a MacBook app, I discovered some codes were associated with different books (the app also pulled the cover art, so it was easy to spot). Never had the time to find out if the bar code scanning was defective (=did not use the check sum) or these were cases of assignment errors, which "shouldn't happen" but have already happened. There is a certain type of ignorant developer who reused "unique IDs", I've even seen a database in production use where GUIDs were recycled (no joke).
- joemi 8mo ago
  Regarding your issues with ISBNs in your personal library, I suspect you must either have had an issue with your lookups/app, or you had several books from a (almost certainly tiny/amateur) publisher who improperly reused ISBNs. I've spent some time working at a bookstore with 80,000+ different ISBNs and I can count the number of issues with ISBN re-use we encountered on one hand. We'd put pricing barcodes on every book in the store, and those were always based on the ISBNs and had the titles and authors printed on them, which was info that came from ISBN lookups either from Bowker's Books-In-Print data or Ingram's data. We'd print the barcodes in large batches and then have to match them to the books based on the title and author shown and verify with the ISBN, so all 80,000+ were checked, and the actual ISBN issues were _extremely_ rare and always from a _very_ small/amateur publisher.

makr17 8mo ago

My favorite example of this sort of thing has been In My Tribe by 10000 Maniacs. The UPC/Catalog Number remained the same between the 1987 release and the removal of Peace Train (track 7) in 1989. I have this memory of sifting through the stock at a large used CD store in the mid-90s hoping to find the pre-removal version.

amiga386 8mo ago
https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/94d44c63-7dee-3921-aa6e-b28b27753cfa https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/94d44c63-7dee-3921-aa6... all with the barcode 075596073820 and catalogue number 60738 / 60738-2 / 9 60738-2 Interesting to read that the reason for the removal was Cat Stevens' apparent endorsement of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. It seems it was the band themselves that requested it? https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/cat-stevens-breaks-his-silence-202844/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/cat-stevens-br...

ggm 8mo ago

I had a dual CD pressing of Bach (double violin concertos plus some other stuff, Zuckerman/Perlman, Colombia passed through a number of subsequent buyouts and re-releases) which simply would not index correctly from the cd-id track stuff. I wound up making an account, uploading the info, managing the 29 different reasons a neophyte makes a mistake causing their data not to be accepted, and finally got my CD into the system. This included using a random chinese persons web from the 90s who presumably had come to Australia and bought the identical pressing which appears to be a hyper-local market specific variant of the ones which other (European, American) markets got. I have massive sympathy for the brainz, because as this article on ISBN and my experience shows, people are cavalier about renewing their 'unique identity' info, when they think they don't have to.

wink 8mo ago

This is kinda topical for me as I just scanned some barcodes off some CDs and my results were: 90-95% detection rate on MusicBrainz, and for the rest it ranged from "yeah, this is clearly the same thing with 10 tracks" to "oh my, there are 7 different regional versions with 10, 11, 12, 13, 13 tracks and I need to pay attention to grab the correct one so the last 3 songs are not wrong" and "this is some 5 EUR sample from an unknown label and really hard to find. Or their docs are not great, I had wished for something like "artist of track 1 = X and artist of track 2 = Y" that probably would have narrowed it down the most.

amiga386 8mo ago
When digitising my collection and using MusicBrainz as the main source of metadata, I had to add about 50 albums nobody had entered before. It has a huge amount of stuff - it already had 95% of my collection - but it's not perfect. The best way to distinguish an album (after barcode or name/artist, and medium) is number of tracks, and if that's not enough, release year/country. I got my metadata by using their Picard tagger and the CD TOC (as it contains the number and lengths of tracks, it's much less ambiguous), but of course opening every case and putting every CD in the drive is a lot more effort than barcode scanning. You can use the advanced search syntax if you need to look up multiple fields at once. https://musicbrainz.org/search https://musicbrainz.org/search -> Type "Release", method "Indexed search with advanced query syntax" For example: barcode:075596073820 AND tracks:11 gives https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=barcode%3A075596073820+AND+tracks%3A11&type=release&limit=25&method=advanced https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=barcode%3A075596073820+... Docs: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Indexed_Search_Syntax https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Indexed_Search_Syntax

cedws 8mo ago

I worked on a project recently to organise my music and came across MusicBrainz. I wanted a reliable API to enrich my music with the proper metadata, but unfortunately the majority of my tracks weren’t in their database at all. Maybe the Anna’s Archive Spotify data will help there. To me it makes the most sense to index music by its fingerprint. Releases, EPs, etc should just be pointers to that.