Style/Titles

(work in progress --warp)

Recording and release group titles

When entering a release group or recording title into MusicBrainz, the title should be normalized by following our guidelines.

This page provides a summary of the important guidelines, please follow the links to the full guidelines when you need more information.

Guideline summary

Follow the appropriate Capitalization Standard

Album and song titles are often found in uppercase on the back cover of CDs. For example, the album Songs of Love and Hate is written as SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE on the cover. This is usually the choice of a graphic designer, not the artist. So, instead of copying the title from the cover, we follow certain rules to capitalize a title. The rules are different for each language.

Please see Capitalization Standard for more information.

Expand abbreviations

Abbreviations in titles (but not acronyms) should generally be expanded. Probably the most common abbreviations used in titles are "Vol." and "Pt.", these should always be expanded to "Volume" and "Part". The main exceptions to this guideline are "feat." for "featuring" and "vs." for "versus".

See AbbreviationStyle for more information.

Use parentheses for extra information

Additional information which is not part of the name of a song or album should be in parentheses. You often see this with alternate versions of tracks, or when an artist is featured on a track.

See ExtraTitleInformation and FeaturingArtistStyle.

Use a colon (:) to separate subtitles

Use a colon (:) to separate any subtitles. If there is an alternative dividing punctuation mark such as the question mark (?) or exclamation point (!), use that mark instead of the colon.

See SubTitleStyle.

Use a slash (/) to separate multiple titles

If two releases are re-released on one CD, or if two songs share the same track, the title should be split as follows: "This Is the Modern World / All Mod Cons".

See MultipleTitleStyle and SplitReleaseTitleStyle.

Use a comma (,) to separate words such as Volume or Part from the title itself

When a release or track is part of a series, seperate the volume or part name from the title with a comma, like this: "The Red Weed, Part 1".

If the title already ends with an alternative punctuation mark, such as a question mark (?) or an exclamation point (!), use that mark instead of the comma.

See VolumeNumberStyle and SeriesNumberStyle.

Exceptions and corner cases

Sometimes it isn't clear how these guidelines should be applied to a particular release, these cases may be discussed by the StyleCouncil. Decisions of the StyleCouncil concerning particular releases, series or corner cases should be followed, these are collected on the User:kuno/Style/Titles/Exceptions page.