New errors introduced in existing (correct) releases in January, February, March and April 2020

Because Discogs changed the data format of the data dumps and I have not yet fixed the scripts that I use there are no monthly statistics yet. But I can still say something about how many previously correct releases actually had errors introduced. As I said (or at least implied) in the previous article this doesn't necessarily mean that the data of the release is now more wrong: it could be that data was added that wasn't previously there and in the added data there is an error (this is what I mostly see).

In January 2020 the 1564 unique releases that had errors introduced were distributed over the data as follows:

Releases in the Discogs database where an error was introduced in January 2020 and which were previously correct

Now, it should be said that this data actually seems to cover a large part of February 2020 as well. The name of the data dump file seems to suggest that it includes data up to February 20.

The 321 unique releases that were changed between February 20 2020 and March 1 2020 and that were previously correct:

Releases in the Discogs database where an error was introduced in February 2020 and which were previously correct

In March 2020 1073 releases that were previously correct had an error introduced:

Releases in the Discogs database where an error was introduced in March 2020 and which were previously correct

Finally, in April 2020 there were 1235 previously correct releases where an error was introduced:

Releases in the Discogs database where an error was introduced in April 2020 and which were previously correct

All these graphs have similar shapes and look very much like the graphs I see of where edits were done in a particular month. So these are not surprising at all.

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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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