History:Live Track Style

Style for Live Tracks

This page describes the style to be used for naming live tracks. Be aware that most parts of the guideline apply to NonAlbumTracks only.

For live tracks on Albums the first example in the list below suffices. In that case, all date and venue information should be added to the album annotations. If more information is needed to distinguish between two tracks with the same title, you can use the sixth example below.

Status: This is a ProposedStyleGuideline.

A TrackTitle consists of different parts. This guide only deals with some of the ExtraTitleInformation, i.e. the part that describes whether the track is a live recording and possibly the date and venue for the recording.

This would be the style for correct titles of live tracks:

1. "Song Name (live)"
2. "Song Name (live, 2004)"
3. "Song Name (live, 2004: The Netherlands)"
4. "Song Name (live, 2004-11)"
5. "Song Name (live, 2004-05-23: Effenaar, Eindhoven, The Netherlands)"
6. "Song Name (1980-01-18: Eindhoven, The Netherlands)"
7. "Song Name (live, Radio 3FM)"
8. "Song Name (live, Radio 3FM, 2004-05-23: Effenaar, Eindhoven, The Netherlands)"
9. "Song Name (1)"
10. "Song Name (2)"

The date and venue naming format is exactly the same as for UntitledBootlegStyle.

Example 9 and 10 are used for tracks that have no date information, or for tracks that are from outtakes. This notation is only used to differentiate between two tracks. E.g. http://musicbrainz.org/showalbum.html?albumid=229500.

Track 'version' information should be in a different pair of parentheses ('acoustic' is considered a version, like a remix name):

• "Song Name (live) (acoustic)"

Discussion

Ordering of live attributes: if a track is acoustic and live, I think it should have (live, acoustic, date: location) or similar appended to it, although this looks a bit clumsy. I am certain, though, that live should be before acoustic. Any nicer-looking suggestions? --MichelleW

This is a lot of text to burden the title with. I could see the usefulness on a bootleg, where it may be difficult to establish the information from liner notes/discographies (if any) but it seems like overkill for official albums where the information is more readily available through other means.

Perhaps a better way to handle this would be to extend the release data to individual tracks as well as albums? (Although that only gives you country-level resolution on the location) --Dupuy

This proposal is partly to counteract the problem of having different live versions of a track on the same album. Often the tracknames get amended to "Trackname 1", "Trackname 2" or random variations thereof ("(1)", ", 1" etc.) I agree it's rather bulky though. --MichelleW

For jazz recordings it is quite usual to label them "(take 1)", "(take 2)" etc. so I would not mind that. Following the general idea of the StyleGuidelines such information should be in brackets and lower case. Isn't that enough? --DonRedman

I think separation of the venue and location is needed rather than commas delimiting both venue, city and country. I would also omit the state for the US, the city and country are suffice, the state is seldom included. Sometimes the day is not available, in those instances I would use 1970-04. --Dave

• I thought the state was quite useful for the US, since there's so many cities with the same name (Springfield, for example) --ZeroGravitas

For live tracks on a live release, I feel that putting the location, date, etc information in the album annotation is enough. Putting it in the track title would make it really bulky. Maybe something could be made as an add-on for album annotations for live albums, kind of what Dupuy was suggesting, for a release attribute per track, but in a (fixed) annotation form? --Sambalbij

• Release date != performance date. Sometimes if tracks on normal albums where released before the liner notes say something like "all tracks released under blah instead of track X released under foo in (some date)". For this a release date would be correct but normally this is better done by linking this track to the original release via AR. So what we whould need if ever was a performance date/venue field. But I think this would be a little overkill. Annotations/comments are enough for this. And as we don't have this yet for tracks I agree that album annotations or this style guideline are the way to do it (with a small preference for the guideline but mostly I'd follow ArtistIntent on the covers). --Shepard

I agree with Sambalbij, location, date, etc information in the album annotation is EXACTLY where such information should go. In the case of a non-album track, than the information should be as simple (such as something simple as mm/dd/yy) as possible to prevent long file names. Dates and cities are NOT part of the name of the track. Its a note and should be treated as such. --GURT

A thought: Windows Media Player says there's a "Recording Date" field. Not sure where venue would go, though. --MichelleW

Please, let's make this official. We have a number of arguements about how else this data could be stored, but not all filetypes have the same data storage abilities. And MB isn't only for tagging, there is no other way to store this data excluding annotations, which puts the data in a nearly unusable place. --SenRepus

• Yep please zout, can you send a quick note to the style list that you wait another few days and make this official in case there is no objection/veto? --Fuchs