Status: 
This page is not maintained anymore. It deals with several issues unresolved by the current StyleGuidelines, but gets less and less up to date when you proceed to the bottom. It is more or less superceded by OpenStyleIssues
If you think that an issue on this page should be picked up, then CreateAWikiPage for it and mention it on the StyleMailingList.
Group/Group Relationship
Refer to ParentRelationshipType discussion.
There's a lack of style for managing:
1) Typical "pre-name" of a band, that will be changed after a while
2) During normal group lifetime they do and record gig(s) or other release, with the same lineup or with only a spin-off od some members, but with a differen name.
Both case could be resolved with an AR like "GroupA is (what?) of GroupB" -- ClutchEr2
Artist's Birth/Death Dates in Performance Name
There have been several discussions of the DateOfBirthStyle for a PerformanceName.
Track attributes
When a song comes in parts, is the part number part of the title, or an attribute? i.e.
Another Brick in the Wall, part 1
vs.
Another Brick in the Wall (part 1)
This is a somewhat cloudy issue I have recently found myself in conflict with other mods on. I see "Another Brick in the Wall" as a single work, I suppose, although it is distributed across various tracks, akin to the "Foo (disc 1)" principle.
A closely related issue is the use of reprise. Neil
For 'part' and 'reprise', I've seen most examples on a CD listing using the parantheses, but with 'reprise' nearly always capped. I don't care either way, as long as it is consistant. Speaking of consistancy, can we get a ruling on part vs. pt.? I've seen them used both ways, and considering there is 1 character difference, I think 'part' is the better choice.jinxie
2004-08-09 TarragonAllen - It is my opinion that "reprise" is generally a description of a song and not truly a title, as defined "A return to an earlier section of a composition after an intervening and contrasting passage". It should be lowercased, and I've modified the Guess Case script in CVS to suit this decision.
2004-08-09 TarragonAllen - With respect to the use of "part" vs "pt.", I recently proposed that no abbeviations should be used within titles to remove any ambiguity as to their meaning (and this appears to have been generally accepted). There is the side-question of whether "part x" is actually part of the title. The easy way to answer this is to remove it and ask yourself "Is the title still complete?". I think on most cases the answer to that question would be "No" ("Another Brick in the Wall, part 1" would not be complete without the "part 1") and so it should be treated as part of the title and not an attribute of the track.
Album Attributes
Almost every use of the word Album on the website should read CD or release. There are cases where the term is used to narrowly refer to an actual physical CD and this causes confusion as a CD can also be a single, EP, soundtrack, anthology or other things that the current metadata specifically distinguishes from an album. In other places it is used to refer to a unit of musical output and should perhaps be widened to release as we can store info about vinyl, casette, DVD and other releases, such as a group of MP3s released together on a web site. Finally, to cover all the bases, some uses of album do actually refer to albums and should remain as they are.
I have never seen a release actually referring to itself as EP; however, I see the review sites etc. use EP and MCP interchangeably for any CD that doesn't have full length of new material but isn't sold at the price and form-factor of singles. Is this the classification MusicBrainz should adopt, or is EP a completely useless classification? Donwulff
I disagree - have several CDs with "EP" on the album cover. Admittedly, EP is a bit of a nebulous definition - I normally take it to mean a release with ~4-7 tracks that's not a proper album, and doesn't generally have the same title as the first track (and so isn't a long single) (horibbly vague, I know). ZeroGravitas.
I still don't recall seeing anywhere in the style guides a mention about releases for different countries. Because there's usually only one or two tracks added for these, but sometimes also subtle changes in tracks released under the same name on all, I think tracking these is very important. Can we get a style guide entry on this? (The word "import" ofcourse should probably never appear, since one country's import is anothers....) Donwulff
A sub-issue about the above point and the behaviour of the tagger... As an example let's say that two versions of an album are in the database, and one is an import/re-issue/remaster that has a couple of bonus tracks. Both indicate the same album title (No designation as mentioned in the point above). Neither of them have trms associated with them yet. I point the tagger at the files, and it matches all the songs based on metadata. I inspect the results in the tagger, and see that everything looks correct (including the album title). I press the button to submit the trms. Now if I were to lookup the results on the site, half of these new trms got applied to one version of the album, and the other half to the version. The flip side is that I may not want whatever designation comes up to differentiate these two versions to appear in my id3/filename/etc. Perhaps we need some sort of sub-attribute in addition to the text of the album title?
Q: Should you enter the subtitle of a release as part of the release name? For example: XYZ Gold has the subtitle "A collection of Christian music hits from the 70's, 80's, and 90's." Now that subtitle is REALLY long, however, it may prove helpful in disambiguating the album in case more XYZ Gold releases are created. [[~Tenebrous~]]
Q: What is the proper way to notate Volume in an album title? A: There is an entry on ProposedStyleGuidelines dealing with this issue. In general, no part of a title should be abbreviated.
"Vs." style. and "Mash-ups"
The problem is that VersusMeansDifferentThings
According to the Style Guide, section 14 (at the time of writing), if a track or album actually contains two tracks, we are to split the track names with a "/". What do we do if the tracks/album is by two different artists? eg: ![[WWW]](/-/musicbrainz/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
http://www.musicbrainz.org/showtrack.html?trackid=1179690 TarragonAllen (Is Gilles Peterson the other artist here?) Neil No, it's "Herbert", see related track mods http://www.musicbrainz.org/mod/search/results.html?object_type=track&orderby=desc&object_id=1179690 TarragonAllen
Artists Listed Together
While #14 addresses how two tracks should be dealt with, what about 2 (or more) artists? To illustrate, a search for 'Santana' turns up the following at the bottom of the list;
Santana + Jeff Beck + Steve Lukather
Anthony Acid, Richie Santana & DJ Skribble
Anthony Acid Richie Santana and DJ Skribble
To help clarify and standardise, I propose a very similar rule. If there are 2 (or more) artists, they shall be separated with a "/".
Santana / Jeff Beck / Steve Lukather
Anthony Acid / Richie Santana / DJ Skribble
Anthony Acid / Richie Santana / DJ Skribble
This would allow for the 'sort name guess' to correctly 'guess' in multiple artist cases, as well as making it easier to automatically 'notice' repeated artists. MB could potentially also meta-link each artist separately, so a person seeing the triplet in these examples could click on JUST one of the names, instead of having to click on all 3 as a group.
Arrangements
...and variations but most of all, classical releases of pop/rock Album and jazz or other rearragenments of classical works. Moderations were it was discussed following
-- ClutchEr2