Finding spelling errors in Czechoslovak and Czech releases on Discogs

Time for a short, but positive post!

Today I got validation that what I do is actually useful for people working with Discogs. While sharing the findings of the previous article about Czechoslovakian manufacturing date codes we were asked if we could also search for a particular misspelling in Czech releases that are impossible to find with the Discogs search functionality.

Apparently the Czech alphabet has a character (ě) that looks a lot like another character (ĕ) and it is difficult for non-Czechs to spot the difference (it took me some time as well), so there was the suspicion that there would be releases where one was used instead the other, but Discogs does not allow you to search for these characters (according to one user on the Czechoslovak forum).

Adding another check to my scripts was fairly trivial (I only had to take care to not search the YouTube playlists as well, which are probably not that interesting). The result: around 90 releases, the results of which have been shared with people on the forums (results that were shared might have been from an instance of the script where the YouTube playlists were not ignored).

Probably there are more users on Discogs who do not know that it is possible to search the Discogs data in a fairly efficient way, and who are doing manual searches that actually could be fully automated. Some of them probably have in depth knowledge about all kinds of bugs in the data, that could easily be turned into patterns.

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SID codes (part 1)

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Using matrix numbers of CDs to verify release years (1)

One of the first steps when making CDs is to produce a "glass master". From that (using a few more steps) a "stamper" is created which is then used to press the actual CDs. When looking at a CD you can often see text in a ring in the middle of the CD. This is the so called matrix which comes from the glass master. Apart from the matrix other text (like the IFPI mastering SID code) could possibly also come from the glass master. A bit of background information can be found on page 7 of the IFPI SID code implementation guide although I would also highly recommend watching some of the clips about glass masters on YouTube, which are highly informative. One company making a lot of these glass masters is Cinram . For most of their glass masters they stored the production date in matrix. This is good news, because it means that it could possibly be used to verify releases and see if the declared year of the release is right: it could never have been released before...

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