Hi Paul,
In many classical recordings Musicbrainz lists balance engineer instead of engineer. I notice that Songkong does not pick up this field. Is there anything I need to do to pick up this field (I don’t see a choice to add this particular field).
Hi, okay using this as an example
https://musicbrainz.org/recording/a65ca6ef-8250-4914-9902-3a667e3a8054
MusicBrainz lets you create a relationship between a Person (Artist) and a Recording with a role, that role maybe a performer like role such as Timothy Mason plays cello or it may be a technical role such as Karl-August Naegler as Recording engineer or Gregor Zielinsky as Balance Engineer.
Now the problem is that MusicBrainz doesnt categorize these roles but the metadata fields used by different aufio formats have different fields for different things, and it does differe between audio formats but with SongKong we provide a set of fields that we can support for all audio fornats. So there is a Performer field that is only intended for musical performers on the track, and there are technical fields such as Producer and Remixer and Engineer. But take the Engineer field as an example that simply lists engineers it cannot capture if Engineer, Recording Engineer or Balance Engineer, we have to do a mapping to decide which type of engineers should be added to the Engineer field and we dont currently include Balance Engineer.
There is also an Involved Person field that can store person and role, but again MusicBrainz can potentially add a huge number of roles, and in the context of music tagging some of these roles such as Legal Representative or Booking are things that are very unlikely to be helpful for tagging., So instead of adding all roles blindly we add a comprehensive subset of the roles.
So in summary maybe we should add Balance Engineer but we dont currently, I dont think we should add all roles blindly.
Paul, I think that with Classical Recordings Balance Engineer is the most important. Not sure what others will think. Many of the box sets I looked at in Musicbrainz use balance engineer in classical recordings.
So thinking about this more, I assume would be preferable to add balance engineer to a new field BALANCE_ENGINEER rather than adding to existing ENGINEER field?
Seems like a good idea to me.
Looking at Albunack we retrieve generic engineer and subtypes balance , audio , sound , recording but they are all grouped together as Role Engineer and passed back to SongKong as ENGINEER
Also at release level we get mastering ( deprecated at recording level ) but also added to ENGINEER, should have their own seperate fields BALANCE_ENGINEER, AUDIO_ENGINEER, SOUND_ENGINEER, RECORDING_ENGINEER,MASTERING (Would also need corresponding sort fields).
Also note when we add roles we currently ignore Assistant , Additional , Co and Associate
Discuss
Paul,
When I look at a recording, the field of most interest to me is balance engineer. Mastering is generally of interest when there is a new remastering of a recording, such as when many box sets are issued and you see if the recording has been remastered.