medley Style

Style for Medleys

This style guide applies to tracks that are labeled as medleys or that have a track name and many songs.

The general style should be "TrackTitle: SongTitle 1 / SongTitle 2 / ..."

If the TrackTitle ends in "medley" it should be changed to "(medley)" unless the TrackTitle is "medley" in which case it shouldn't be changed. Also, if the word medley is obviously part of the TrackTitle it should not be converted to (medley).

If a SongTitle is repeated, it should be listed each time as if it weren't the same SongTitle.

Song numbers or letters should not be included.

You can use the MedleyRelationshipType to link a medley to the individual songs, recorded elsewhere, that make it up.

Example

1. Foo

1. Bar
2. Baz
3. Quux

should be "Foo: Bar / Baz / Quux"

1. Foo Medley

1. Bar
2. Baz
3. Bar

should be "Foo (medley): Bar / Baz / Bar"

1. Medley

1. Bar
2. Baz
3. Quux

should be "Medley: Bar / Baz / Quux"

1. This Is a Great Medley

1. Bar
2. Baz
3. Quux

should be "This Is a Great Medley: Bar / Baz / Quux"

Discussion

I don't think SongTitles should have numbers or letters because different releases might use different schemes (e.g. "a. ", "A. ", "I. " "* ", etc.). --dseomn

I think "1 / 2 / ..." is better than "1, 2, ..., and N" because different languages use different commas (e.g. Hebrew uses a backwards comma) and it might be hard to figure out what language to write "and" in if the track uses different languages. Also, even if the track only uses one language, the moderator may not know the word for and. --dseomn

I asked some related questions on PartNumberStyle. See also how g0llum handled this on the albums of Douglas Adams (for example the first 3 albums) and how it is done on Ayreon's The Final Experiment. What about part titles that are not mentioned on the cover but in the lyrics inside the booklet? When are they to be taken into the title?

I tried to analyze this a little bit and show why there are connections to PartNumberStyle: There are different cases:

1. One song which has several parts which are spread over several tracks (-> PartNumberStyle)
2. Several songs which are combined in one track (-> MedleyStyle)
3. One song which consists of several parts / sections but which are all combined in one track (-> ...?)

It is not always clear how to separate between 2. and 3. Often you also have mix forms like: one song/works which has several parts, some of them spread over tracks, some of them combined in one track. --Shepard

• I agree. I think this would perhaps be better resolved with 1 and 3 being covered by PartNumberStyle (see recent discussion there), and 2 being covered by an extention of MultipleTitleStyle - such that it can contain a title of the track - "TrackTitle: Sub-TrackTitle 1 / Sub-TrackTitle 2 / etc" --Gecks
  • Or case 3 is covered by SeparateTitleStyle (which should be renamed to SubTitleStyle) as I wrote there. But still the question remains (as also for medleys): When does this info has to be included in the title and when not? --Shepard

I still don't like this proposal very much and I will try to show you why on an example I mentioned in the IRC: Die längste Single der Welt with it's full track list (note: it only has one track with 30 parts).

1. The title of the track according to this proposal had to be: Die längste Single der Welt!: Intro / Sieben Tage, sieben Nächte / Wahnsinn / Du bist ein Wunder / 20 Jahre danach / Ich wünsche dir viel Glück auf deiner Reise / Bronze, Silber und Gold / Jessica / Ganz oder gar nicht / Was ist denn schon dabei / Tu's doch / Lieben oder hassen / Nur für dich will ich da sein / Nur ein kleines Stück Papier / Du willst leben wie es dir gefällt / Sommer in der Stadt / Der Himmel brennt / Wieso und weshalb denn? / Du gehörst zu mir / Frei für dich / Endlich weiß ich, wovon du heimlich träumst / Ich will und ich will dich / Ohne dich bin ich verloren / Ich steh' auf dich / Jede Menge Liebe / Gianna / Könnt' ich noch einmal mit dir leben / Wenn du mich brauchst / Ich Will Noch Mehr / Verlieben, verloren, vergessen, verzeih'n
2. This is not possible with the current implementation that limits track names to a length of 255 characters, here we have 775 characters. And it's not a good idea to change the DB scheme to allow longer names, because that'd cost some performance.

• Unless it's a significant problem, this shouldn't be an issue. Also these large strings are the exception rather than the rule - just like large strings for TrackTitles's, which probably exist. --Gecks

1. It wouldn't be possible to name a MP3/OGG/... by the title because it even exceeds the limits of a lot of filesystems and who really wants a 775 character title in his tags?

• This is a tagger problem. The database should be accurate, the tagger is the thing responsible for transferring this data to tags in a way that works. --Gecks

1. It would be completely unreadable in the web-interface and everywhere else you need to show the TrackTitle.

• Again, I don't think we should comprimise on accuracy - the problem here is that the web interface isn't capable, not that the information is wrong :) --Gecks

1. We have AdvancedRelationships, I see no reason why we are still trying to put everything in the TrackTitles. It's correct that the relationship information is not presented well in the current form, but that's already on the way of being fixed.--Fuchs

• Well AR doesn't get put into the tags, so why not make guidelines to suit the here and now? We can always run scripts to transfer them at a later date. --Gecks Is all of that in the TrackList, or is it in the booklet? If it's in the booklet and not the TrackList on most medleys with that many tracks, I think it would be better to say that if it doesn't have the SongTitles listed in the track list it should be listed as in the TrackList and the SongTitles should be listed in the annotation (or ARs? I'm still not sure how ARs are relavent to SongTitles in medleys), otherwise this proposal applies.--dseomn
  • It's a single so there's no real booklet and it is printed in the [http://www.freecovers.net/view/1/ffe632d9ee30915d2b665974d9ef33e4/Wolfgang-Petry-Die-L�ngste-Single-Der-Welt-Back.html track list]. Actually it's even printed as if this disc had 30 tracks which it has not.--Fuchs
    • Arbitrary limits on filename length or tags should be imposed by the tagger, not by the data in the server itself. The server should also be clever enough to truncate unreasonably long names. That takes care of most of the above points. I agree with your last point - where there's a separate title, there's no point adding all the individual parts. However, this breaks down if either there is no overall title, or the individual parts were never recorded elsewhere, so there's nothing to link to. So I think this style guideline would remain anyway, but only for those cases. --MatthewExon

We should keep in mind that MedleyRelationshipType cannot describe the order the songs appear in the track so it cannot be used to replace the additional info.

ID3v2 has three fields for track titles, one for a group, one for the MainTitle and one for SubTitless and/or ExtraTitleInformation. So if we build a new db scheme on this base we could get rid of a lot of problems. But of course this is far future. --Shepard

History

First(?) raised in this thread on the MailingList. --paul

Page moved from TrackSections to MedleyStyleProposal and content added by dseomn.