How Discogs' email notification could be improved

I think it is time for another usability rant. Although I myself am far from a usability expert (the best courses I took at university were about usability that taught me to stay far away from it) I do suffer from user interfaces with quirks and Discogs is no exception.

I have written about this subject before (images, data entry, etc.) but it bites me and my friend gerjolp every time we are on Discogs. While editing releases for correctness (such as the depósito legal fixes described an an earlier post) where people made snarky remarks about whether or not we didn't have anything better to do. This was a bit strange, as the data for the releases is more complete now and this should be encouraged.

My guess is that the real reason is not that the releases were edited but the fact that Discogs sends a notification e-mail for every change that is made and some people got hundreds of e-mails with all an identical message about a similar change in many releases. Instead of flagging it with Discogs saying "could you please change your mail blast system" they started complaining to the person making the changes. Basically they were saying "please stop improving the data, because I am getting too many e-mails", which can be discouraging.

The real solution of course would be to fix the way notifications are sent in Discogs, although I wouldn't know how it can be improved. I could imagine that something like an hourly digest could work.

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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...

Vinyl & Data

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