Release groups usage guideline: Difference between revisions

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** Slipknot's "[http://test.musicbrainz.org/release-group/08f5be36-086c-411d-af2e-de2aabacc4e4.html Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)]"
** Slipknot's "[http://test.musicbrainz.org/release-group/08f5be36-086c-411d-af2e-de2aabacc4e4.html Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)]"
* Re-releases.
* Re-releases.
** Blind Guardian's "[http://test.musicbrainz.org/release-group/f9de2cc5-e19e-4060-9aa7-0321c84698cc.html Nightfall in Middle-Earth]" released in 1998 and then in 2007.


A release group is not:
A release group is not:

Revision as of 01:51, 22 May 2009

Current Musicbrainz server release feature a concept called Release Groups. Just as the name suggests, it groups several releases together in one entity. Since this is not obviously clear, this page explains the difference and gives some guidelines on how to handle them.

Both release groups and releases are "albums" in colloquial sense, but with a slight difference: a release is something you can buy as media, e.g. a CD box, a vinyl record etc. on its own, while a release group embraces the concept of an album -- it doesn't matter how many CDs or editions/versions it had. When an artist tells you "We've released our new album", he's talking about a release group. When his publisher says "This new album gets released next week in Japan and next month in Europe", he's talking about several releases belonging to the release group the artist has told you about.

Therefore a release group is a single group of releases containing:

A release group is not:

Musicbrainz automatically considers every release in the database to be part of a release group, even if this group only contains this one release. Therefore, grouping releases only requires merging several release groups. The following criteria should help you to decide which releases should be merged and which should not.