ISRC codes in Discogs (part 4)

Time to look at ISRC codes again because I am still not done researching them. If you don't know what it is, I would suggest that you first read part 1, part 2 and part 3. To better understand some of my complaints below you should also read about why I think that Discogs stores the ISRC fields in the wrong place.

So now that we've got that out of the way we can start. The ISRC field in Discogs is in the "Barcodes and Other Identifiers" (BaOI) section, which I already explained is not the correct place and it should be with the individual tracks. Right now people are using descriptions (a free text field) to indicate which ISRC code belongs to which release.

Because I know how bad people are with typing in correct information (and of course I am not immune to this) I was wondering in how many releases people make mistakes. I added a very simple check to my scripts to see if descriptions were being reused (copy/paste errors, or "off by one" errors). With the latest data dump I was pleasantly surprise to only find 27 releases with duplicate descriptions with my current check. Not bad, but I am still very much convinced that ISRC codes should not be with the BaOI field in the vast majority of cases.

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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...

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