Vinyl & Data

I haven't looked at SPARS codes for a while but I thought it would be interesting to see which SPARS code is used the most. If you haven't read my previous articles about SPARS codes I suggest you do that first. What I wondered is: how often is each SPARS code used on a release? I looked at the releases where I have verified that there is a valid SPARS code. There are more releases with SPARS codes in Discogs, but a lot of releases (at least 24,000) still need to be fixed at the time of writing and these haven't been looked at. In total I looked at 113,975 releases from data up to October 31 2019. The breakdown: DDD: 52,082 releases AAD: 33,821 releases ADD: 28,564 releases DAD: 480 releases AAA: 120 releases DDA: 87 releases ADA: 15 releases DAA: 12 releases If you add these numbers you will get more than 113,975. This is because some releases have more than one SPARS code as the mix can actually be different per track. What is clear is that the "regul...

Back in 2018 I looked at how many releases had a SPARS code, and a release date before SPARS codes were actually introduced. You can read about that here . Back then I found 30 releases and I promised I would revisit this topic sometime later. I just looked at the data up to October 31 and I found 61 releases. That's actually an increase. Bah. Releases in Discogs with a SPARS code and dated before SPARS codes were introduced It seems there is still some work to do!

In the last few weeks I have been digging a lot into CDs and I have come to the conclusion that correctly identifying CDs is difficult: there are so many things that you have to take into account and it is easy to make a mistake. Luckily automation helps! I decided to look at SPARS codes again, as I felt that story was not yet complete. If you don't know what SPARS codes are, I would suggest to first read my earlier posts about: part 1 , part 2 and part 3 . On Wikipedia it says that SPARS code were introduced in 1984 . Of course, we all know that if it is on Wikipedia it just has to be true! Wikipedia has a reference to a physical magazine from 1984 and with a bit of searching I found someone who actually describes the same magazine and which seems to confim what Wikipedia says. So, I wondered: how many releases are there in the Discogs database with a defined SPARS code field (containing a valid SPARS code) and a declared release date prior to 1984? I was surprised to f...

It is time for me to dig into SPARS codes again. Before reading this article it is advised to first read part 1 and part 2 of this series about SPARS codes. One thing that noticed when digging into possible smells for SPARS codes is that sometimes I would see a code named CDC that was tagged as a SPARS code. As that letter actually isn't in the SPARS code specifications I was wondering what it was and how often it appeared in the Discogs database. As it turns out this is a code specific to Sony Music that somehow indicates the format. There are more have these codes, which have been discussed several times in the Discogs forums already. I updated my scripts to see how many of these Sony Music codes were in SPARS Code fields. Surprisingly few: I could find just 23 but lots of SPARS Code fields still need to be fixed, so I am expecting more to pop up once these get "fixed". As always, scripts have been updated to check for these Sony codes in SPARS code fi...

Before reading this article it is recommended to first read part 1 about SPARS codes. SPARS codes in Format free text field One thing I saw a few times is that people used the free text field in the Format field to store the SPARS code. I was wondering how often that happened. Using my scripts and the latest data dump that was quite easy to find out. A few simple additions (will be pushed to GitHub soon) I looked at if there was a SPARS code in the free text field for the format, but only if the SPARS code was the only thing in the free text field. In total I found 441 releases, but I did not check how many of these have a SPARS Code field, because regardless of that it is an error: if there is no SPARS Code field, there should be one, and if there is one, then the SPARS code in the format should be there. On October 31 2017 there were 441 releases in the Discogs database where the SPARS code was recorded in the Format free text field. What is surprising is that even ...

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 ...