Vinyl & Data

One thing that I have hardly looked into is the section "Label, Company, Catalog Number, Etc." or "LCCN" in Discogs lingo (although it is only called that in the data entry form, on regular pages it says "Companies, etc."). In this section information such as the label, record company, distributor and much more should be entered. But of course, this often doesn't happen, partially also because people don't know what to enter. I believe that with a little bit of data mining it should be possible to find at least some of the data. I already showed that it works for depósito legal values so why shouldn't it for others? Let's look at an example from, again, Spain, namely this release on the Pye label . On the rear sleeve the following can be seen: Looking at the label page for Discos Belter : "Discos Belter, S.A. also offered distribution services and was a licensee for Motown, Pye Records, Salsoul Records, Prelude Records, ...

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...

Somewhere in the 1980s records started to appear with the "DMM" (Direct Metal Mastering) method. The whole background about DMM is explained on Wikipedia much better than I could do, so I will just focus on DMM in Discogs. In Discogs there is no special field to indicate that a record was made using DMM, so some people have used the free text field in the "Format" section for it. I looked at how often this happened: 571 times, which are distributed like this in the Discogs database: Distribution of releases tagged DMM This seems to be quite low as there should be many many more (especially the 1980s pop records). Of course, one explanation could be that it is actually not relevant information. I am not aware of records that were both pressed as DMM and non-DMM releases and where the only difference is that DMM was used (but I could be wrong). One thing that I also looked at is how many release were in Discogs that have DMM in the free text field but whic...

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 for a short, but positive post! Today I got validation that what I do is actually useful for people working with Discogs. While sharing the findings of the previous article about Czechoslovakian manufacturing date codes we were asked if we could also search for a particular misspelling in Czech releases that are impossible to find with the Discogs search functionality. Apparently the Czech alphabet has a character (ě) that looks a lot like another character (ĕ) and it is difficult for non-Czechs to spot the difference (it took me some time as well), so there was the suspicion that there would be releases where one was used instead the other, but Discogs does not allow you to search for these characters (according to one user on the Czechoslovak forum). Adding another check to my scripts was fairly trivial (I only had to take care to not search the YouTube playlists as well, which are probably not that interesting). The result: around 90 releases, the results of which hav...

Another country that put dates on its releases is Czechoslovakia (I am using past tense, as the country no longer exists). On most releases from this country from the late 1960s - early 1990s you can find a so called "manufacturing date code", or something similar to that. The page for the Opus label on Discogs says: "Most Czechoslovak vinyl records pressed between ca. 1967 and 1992 include a three-digit code on the side A center label . The first two digits represent the year, the third digit the half-year of the pressing. For example, a record with code '75 2' on the label has been manufactured in the 2nd half of 1975." and goes on to explain that this code does not necessarily mean that the record was also released in that year, but that it could have been held back for whatever reason. But it does mean that it can be used for checking the release year to see if it is perhaps wrong (too early). so I did just that. I looked at a few things in t...

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...

One thing that I had never heard about is the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC). According to the Wikipedia page about ISRC (worth reading) it is actually already almost 30 years old. These codes are interesting for datamining for a few reasons: the year in which the code was assigned is embedded in it, even though there are some exceptions: apparently in early days the recording year was used. they are specific to a single recording These two characteristics make it an ideal piece of data for checks and comparisons. Sometimes the ISRC code is printed on releases, but sometimes also embedded in some of the metadata on CDs. I never knew about ISRC, as I don't have releases with the code (or at least, I never paid attention) and I never have had a (standalone) CD-player that displayed these codes by default. ISRC in Discogs The ISRC field is a relative new addition to the Barcode and Other Identifers (BaOI) section. In retrospect it might have been better to ...

I wanted to call this post "Return of the SID", but there is only so much nerdiness you can squeeze into one topic. But, I am going to talk about SID codes once again, so it is best to first read part 1 , part 2 and part 3 about SID codes if you are not familiar with them. SID codes are inherently tied to CDs, or CD-like media (DVD, Blu-Ray, and so on) and have not been used anywhere else. One thing I wondered: for how many releases in the Discogs database have SID codes been defined when it actually is a different format for which SID codes do not make any sense at all, such as vinyl, or cassettes? So I got the latest Discogs data dump (releases until November 1 2017), adapted my scripts , ran some tests and got quite interesting results: 332 vinyl records 151 cassettes 24 files (digital music files) 13 shellac discs 2 DCC releases 1 VHS release 1 Memory Stick release 1 Edison Disc Especially the Edison Disc made me chuckle, as it is such an ancient format, an...

One thing that I learned when I was looking through releases on Discogs is that not everything that I thought is vinyl is actually vinyl. Many 7"s (and some LPs) in the US were made from styrene instead of vinyl and made with a different technique, namely injection molding. Apparently it is cheaper to produce than vinyl and singles were basically seen as a throwaway product, so the fact that the quality wasn't as good as vinyl didn't matter. My guess is that by shaving off even a tiny bit of the costs per unit big savings could be made. Depeche Mode said it: everything counts in large amounts. I never encountered styrene records before because in my collection there are very few 7"s from the US, but recently a friend bumped into a few. The differences are obvious: you just feel that something isn't quite the same. The disc feels brittle and it isn't as flexible as vinyl. When you tap a styrene disc with your finger it also makes a different sound than when y...

If you are into collecting records it has probably happened to you: you are at a record fair and wonder whether or not you already have the record you are holding in your hands and you need to decide whether to buy it or not on the spot. It certainly has happened to me: I have bought plenty of duplicates, or was absolutely certain that I had a certain record, only to find out at home that I actually didn't have it. I sometimes also go through my record collection and see records that look very similar (to illustrate that: I have about 20 different copies of Queen's Greatest Hits) and then wonder what the difference between them is, as I tend to forget the subtle differences. This information is (mostly) recorded in online databases such as Discogs, but I am not always near my computer (strange, but true). So I was thinking: what can I do to connect these two worlds? One answer I came up with: make labels with QR codes that point to the right release on Discogs and use my sm...

One piece of information that you can find on European releases that you will typically not see on other releases is the so called "Label Code". This code, handed out by GVL in Germany, uniquely identifies the label on which a record was released. Full background can be found on the German Wikipedia page about Label Codes . Discogs has a field dedicated to these codes in its database as well, and a partial list of the label codes (new labels, plus mutations, starting 01-01-2017) is available from the GVL website, so that opens up quite a few possibilities to compare data from the database with the external list from GVL, as well as with the rest of the data in the dump. Fun! Label Code structure Label Codes are very simple: first the letters LC (usually uppercase, but likely lowercase characters are used here and there too), followed by 4 or 5 digits, and sometimes some delimiter (whitespace, hyphen and possibly others as well). A few common examples are below but ...

At the beginning of every month (usually the 3rd or 4th day of the month) Discogs releases a data dump of various parts of the database: individual releases master releases artists labels This data is released under the CC0 license , basically allowing unlimited reuse, which is very cool and opens up all kinds of possibilities, which got me really excited about the possibilities (and caused a sleepless night or two). I have not fully looked into all the data and in this post (and the next few) I will only look at the XML of the individual releases. Individual releases in the Discogs data Every month the data for all individual releases of Discogs is made available as a gzip compressed XML dump. This file is quite big: the dump for September 2017 is 4.9 GiB when it is gzip compressed. Uncompressed it is 32 GiB. The data dump for September 2017 contains information about 8,878,391 releases The Discogs database had information about  8,878,391 releases on September 1 20...