Vinyl & Data

One thing that I learned about data entry: it is difficult! People are sloppy and tend to make silly mistakes and then overlook them, because the brain is great at error correction, making you blind for these mistakes. I bumped into one particular error in Discogs twice while looking at possible errors for specific pressing plants . And, I thought, if I can already see it twice by sampling a small section of releases, then it has to be more common. The error that I found is that the matrix numbers of the PMDC plants were misspelled as " PDMC " (interestingly, PDMC was another completely unrelated plant). Some likely reasons: sometimes the matrix is mirrored (tricky for the brain) copy and paste errors from elsewhere (personal) PDMC is easier to say than PMDC Using my scripts and the latest datadump I found 62 releases with this particular error. They are distributed as follows in Discogs: Releases where PMDC is likely misspelled as PDMC in the matrix I...

Using pressing plant information to find wrong information in releases in Discogs is something that I explored in an earlier post . I only looked at a single pressing plant and that already uncovered 76 releases that were obviously incorrect. I added a few more checks for pressing plants to my scripts and processed the latest Dicogs data dump that I could find. Immediately hundreds of more errors popped up, and I didn't even add that many companies to my checks. With the new checks I could find 610 that are wrong, but I am sure that as soon as I start adding more checks many more errors will pop up. Releases in Discogs where manufacturing plants and release years don't match What often seems to be the case that people have combined the original release with reissues, making the entries completely useless for a correct classification. One thing that I noticed when looking at the pages for the manufacturing plants is that there are quite a few where it is mentioned w...

Something that has turned out surprisingly hard to do is to categorize CDs. While at first it seemed easier than vinyl it has turned out to be much more difficult, as CDs have been repressed in different years by different plants (or the same under a different name), but where everything is the same, except for some very minor details, such as SID codes, or the CD matrix. I have already written about SID codes and how they can be used to very roughly date CD releases . But there is also other information that can be used to see if releases have been dated (somewhat) correctly. Recently I decided to look at the companies that are listed, see when they were operational and use that information for checking release years. Quite a few CDs were pressed at a particular plant in the US. During its lifetime this plant operated under different names: PDO, USA from 1986 - 1992 PMDC, USA from 1992 - 1999 UML from 1999 - 2005 EDC, USA from 2005 - 2009 There is some overlap: some g...