Just trying to clarify what is put in these tags. As I understand it, they are only populated if the “song” is part of a multi-movement work (presumably as indicated by MusicBrainz). However, they are not populated from the MB database itself (the MUSICBRAINZ_WORK_… tags are used for that) but rather from the Title tag. It seems that “Movement” is everything after the last colon-space (minus the number) and that “Work” is everything before the first colon-space. This mostly works fine if the MB Title is in the format “Work: Movement”. Some titles are not exactly in that format, however (e.g. this one - https://musicbrainz.org/recording/52a80898-80ae-4a11-a8dc-3afb7477a438 in my collection). An extra colon appears to result in the middle section of text (“Scherzo”) being lost. I assume that is unavoidable and is ideally fixed by editing the MB data (so that it doesn’t cause problems for others, either).
Another badly-edited album in MB is https://musicbrainz.org/release/55e10969-b484-424a-bb2a-b6645568d9dc, which has a Title in the format “Composer: Work-composition”. SongKong seems to discard the Composer part of the title, leaving it with no colons and therefore no ability to make a work: movement split, despite there being multi-levels in MB. Is that correct?
Knowing how SongKong operates here would be especially useful so that I can make my MB edits have the intended effect.
Thanks.
Work and movement tags for classical music
Work and Movement use the best information available, this may be from the title and/or MusicBrainz work fields. Currently it favours the title in the case of a single ‘:’ since the title is usually better represents what it says on the album whereas the associated MusicBrainz work may differ significantly, e.g the title may be in English but may be a recording of a work in another language and the work may be written in that language. Users usually want to group movements by work based onn how the work is known on that specific release.
The extra colon processing is still subject to improvement.
We added special processing to recognise composers in title as this is not part of the work so its correct for SongKong to not be able to derive a work:movement from title, however it should then look at MusicBrainz works and work it out It does seem to do this so it may simply be that improvements in dev have not yet made it to public release.
There are number of special cases so this summarizes how it works but it doesn’t currently work for 100% of cases, and probably never will.