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SID codes (part 4)

I wanted to call this post "Return of the SID", but there is only so much nerdiness you can squeeze into one topic. But, I am going to talk about SID codes once again, so it is best to first read part 1, part 2 and part 3 about SID codes if you are not familiar with them.

SID codes are inherently tied to CDs, or CD-like media (DVD, Blu-Ray, and so on) and have not been used anywhere else. One thing I wondered: for how many releases in the Discogs database have SID codes been defined when it actually is a different format for which SID codes do not make any sense at all, such as vinyl, or cassettes? So I got the latest Discogs data dump (releases until November 1 2017), adapted my scripts, ran some tests and got quite interesting results:
  • 332 vinyl records
  • 151 cassettes
  • 24 files (digital music files)
  • 13 shellac discs
  • 2 DCC releases
  • 1 VHS release
  • 1 Memory Stick release
  • 1 Edison Disc
Especially the Edison Disc made me chuckle, as it is such an ancient format, and this particular release had been released some 70 years before SID codes were even invented.

With the shellac discs and Edison Disc it was mostly that people picked the wrong option in the drop down box for BaOI, but for most other releases people simply copied from a CD or DVD release (using "copy to draft") and never bothered to either adapt or remove the old data (including tracklisting, catalog numbers, barcodes, and so on). There were also a few releases where there was for example a CD with a vinyl release, but the release was only tagged as "vinyl".

This could have course have been prevented if Discogs would have displayed warnings when people submitted releases by for example giving a warning like "It looks like you are submitting a vinyl release, but you have SID codes, which do not exist for vinyl records.".

It shows  that there is still a lot that can be improved.
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