The tracklisting is one of the most essential parts of a release in Discogs, but for quite a few people it is proving difficult to get it right. What I often see with new entries in the database is that they are copied from an already existing release (using the powerful but dangerous "copy to draft" functionality in Discogs) and that information is adapted, but not all of the information. For the tracklist I see for example that for vinyl records or cassettes an already existing entry of a CD is used as a template and that the tracklisting is not adapted.
This is important: CDs have a single side, but vinyl records and cassettes have two sides (or are single sided). Yet it is very common to find vinyl releases or cassettes in Discogs with no indication what side the tracks are on. What happens is that some people then ask the submitter to fix it.
So I wondered: how often does this really happen? It wouldn't be the first time for me to think "that has to be a huge problem!" only for the data to tell me that it is actually a very minor issue. I updated my scripts, checked the latest data dump and what I found I wasn't quite prepared for: 145,925 vinyl/cassette releases with a possibly wrong tracklisting exist in the Discogs database. This makes wrong tracklistings currently the biggest "smell".
What is immediately obvious is that it is increasing (the last release number in the database dump is around 11,219,100, so I expect that the bar for 11,000,000 - 11,999,999 will become around five times as large). Uff.
This is important: CDs have a single side, but vinyl records and cassettes have two sides (or are single sided). Yet it is very common to find vinyl releases or cassettes in Discogs with no indication what side the tracks are on. What happens is that some people then ask the submitter to fix it.
So I wondered: how often does this really happen? It wouldn't be the first time for me to think "that has to be a huge problem!" only for the data to tell me that it is actually a very minor issue. I updated my scripts, checked the latest data dump and what I found I wasn't quite prepared for: 145,925 vinyl/cassette releases with a possibly wrong tracklisting exist in the Discogs database. This makes wrong tracklistings currently the biggest "smell".
Wrong tracklistings are by far the biggest problem in Discogs.I say "possibly wrong" because some people used "dividers" to indicate the sides, or some releases are single sided and people simply didn't bother to indicate which side the music is on. Still this is a massive amount. The distribution of releases across the data looks like this:
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| Distribution of vinyl/cassette releases in Discogs with possibly wrong tracklistings |
What is immediately obvious is that it is increasing (the last release number in the database dump is around 11,219,100, so I expect that the bar for 11,000,000 - 11,999,999 will become around five times as large). Uff.
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