Indian PKD codes in Discogs

Some countries require that music releases have certain identifiers on them. A well known example is the depósito legal identifier in Spain that I wrote about several times before.

But other countries have it similar things as well. One of them is India, which for new releases requires a so called "PKD". This code contains the month and year in which the release was made, or at least when it was packed (I have seen it being talked about as both a production date, as well as a packaging date). One of my friends at Discogs (gerjolp) looked into these codes a bit, but could not find many references, just a few forum threads and the exact meaning remains a bit unclear, also because sometimes the date seems to have been stamped instead of printed, and this is not clear from the data in the database.

PKD codes in Discogs

There are 132 releases from India in the latest Discogs dump where it is easy to find the PKD code in BaOI. There are likely many more releases in Discogs where this code should have been added, but was not.

There are two checks that I implemented in my scripts:

absence of a year in the release
wrong year of the release (because earlier than the year in the PKD code)

There were 13 releases where something was wrong. For 9 there was a wrong year, and in most cases it turned out that someone had a repress and added the information of the repress (sometimes including pictures) to the original version, even though it should have been submitted as a separate release. For 4 releases no date was given or an earlier date had been removed as there was uncertainty about them.

As can be seen there is actually too little data to say something useful. My guess is that in perhaps a year (after more releases from India have been added) this might have changed, and I might revisit the topic then.

Comments

SID codes (part 1)

One thing that I only learned about after using Discogs is the so called Source Identification Code, or SID. These codes were introduced in 1994 to combat piracy and to find out on which machines a CD was made. It was introduced by Philips and adopted by IFPI, and specifications are publicly available which clearly describe the two available SID codes (mastering SID code and mould SID code). Since quite a few months Discogs has two fields available in the " Barcode and Other Identifiers " (BaOI) section: Mould SID code Mastering SID code A few questions immediately popped up in my mind: how many releases don't have a SID field defined when there should be (for example, the free text field indicates it is a SID field)? how many releases have a SID field with values that should not be in the SID field? how many release have a SID field, but a wrong year (as SID codes were only introduced in 1994) how many vinyl releases have a SID code defined (which is impossi...

SPARS codes (part 1)

Let's talk about SPARS codes used on CDs (or CD-like formats). You have most likely seen it used, but maybe don't know its name. The SPARS code is a three letter code indicating if recording, mixing and mastering were analogue or digital. For example they could look like the ones below. There is not a fixed format, so there are other variants as well. Personally I am not paying too much attention to these codes (I simply do not care), but in the classical music world if something was labeled as DDD (so everything digital) companies could ask premium prices. That makes it interesting information to mine and unlock, which is something that Discogs does not allow people to do when searching (yet!) even though it could be a helpful filter. I wanted to see if it can be used as an identifier to tell releases apart (are there similar releases where the only difference is the SPARS code?). SPARS code in Discogs Since a few months SPARS is a separate field in the Discogs ...

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...

Vinyl & Data

Search This Blog