Vinyl & Data

In Discogs each release has one or more Format fields, in which a contributor has to indicate what format a device has, or what formats a device has, in case it has multiple formats. I simply looked at all the releases in the database and simply counted, and this is the list I got (from most releases to fewest releases): Vinyl: 4,819,258 CD: 2,913,785 File: 917,569 Cassette: 647,604 CDr: 386,541 Shellac: 146,494 DVD: 85,475 Box Set: 52,634 All Media: 29,217 Flexi-disc: 20,814 VHS: 18,674 8-Track Cartridge: 15,206 Acetate: 9,580 DVDr: 8,581 Lathe Cut: 8,023 SACD: 6,380 Reel-To-Reel: 5,022 Blu-ray: 3,705 Laserdisc: 3,077 Memory Stick: 1,701 Minidisc: 1,613 Edison Disc: 1,308 Cylinder: 1,290 Betacam SP: 1,060 Hybrid: 1,012 Floppy Disk: 1,003 Blu-ray-R: 674 CDV: 601 4-Track Cartridge: 593 DCC: 397 Pathé Disc: 367 U-matic: 362 Betamax: 263 DAT: 209 PlayTape: 144 Microcassette: 135 HD DVD: 65 MiniDV: 57 UMD: 51 VHD: 40 SelectaVision: 37 Tefifon: 3...

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...

Another thing that I wondered about when looking at tracklistings: in how many of those tracklistings have people duplicated numbers or letters? I saw at least one, but there have to be many more. Then again I thought that this is probably something that I should not be wanting to wonder about based on my earlier experiences with errors found in tracklistings . Nevertheless, I pushed ahead and what I feared: there are lots of releases where in tracklist positions are duplicated. I found 101,474 instances in 31,056 releases. Releases with possible duplication of tracklist positions While most of these seem to be actual errors there are also a few exceptions, which are not always easy to identify automatically: some vinyl releases (like singles) are a double A side and will have 'A' on both sides of the label some releases don't have A/B sides, but instead have "This/That" or use something else some promotional releases have the same song on both side...

Time to dig a bit deeper into the tracklistings, as I believe there is a bit more to the story than what I wrote about in an earlier post . One thing that I kept wondering about is: is this mostly a problem for vinyl releases or for cassettes? I adapted my scripts to also output the format so I can answer this question. As an extra I also checked for shellac records and 8 track cartridges, which also have sides. My scripts found 944 shellac records that possibly have a wrong tracklist. There are even more 8 track cartridges than shellac records with a possible tracklist issue: 1144. This means that the total amount of releases I found with possible tracklist problems is now 148,013. The shellac releases with possibly wrong tracklistings are distributed over the data as follows: Distribution of shellac records with a possibly wrong tracklist in the Discogs data. For 8 track cartridges it looks like this: Distribution of 8 track cartridges with a possibly wrong tracklist...

The tracklisting is one of the most essential parts of a release in Discogs, but for quite a few people it is proving difficult to get it right. What I often see with new entries in the database is that they are copied from an already existing release (using the powerful but dangerous "copy to draft" functionality in Discogs) and that information is adapted, but not all of the information. For the tracklist I see for example that for vinyl records or cassettes an already existing entry of a CD is used as a template and that the tracklisting is not adapted. This is important: CDs have a single side, but vinyl records and cassettes have two sides (or are single sided). Yet it is very common to find vinyl releases or cassettes in Discogs with no indication what side the tracks are on. What happens is that some people then ask the submitter to fix it. So I wondered: how often does this really happen? It wouldn't be the first time for me to think "that has to be a hug...