On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 2:42 AM, Kuno Woudt <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 07:21:46PM -0800, jacobbrett wrote: > > > > I was thinking moments ago, why not allow the option of using the artist > > comment as a field in Picard? At the moment Artist Comments are used > solely > > to distinguish *different artists of similar names*, but why couldn't the > > use be changed to succinctly describing *any* artist in 1-4 (or so) > words? > > I imagine it could be useful in programs such as foobar2000, where it > would > > act as an artist subtitle - imagine browsing through yours or someone > else's > > huge library and being overwhelmed by a long list of artists. Having the > > artist comment next to each name (for example, in the form "Blues > Brothers > > (blues/soul revivalist band)") would firstly better allow the application > to > > sort different artists of the same name (as an alternative to sorting by > > MBID) and thus better distinguish similarly titled artists, and it would > add > > semantic meaning to artist names while browsing through that long list. > > I would like the option to add an artist comment when creating a new > artist, to serve as a disambiguation comment for possible future > artists with the same name. > > I can also see that it would be useful for picard to do something with > the field. > > But I wouldn't want to change the field to by anything other than a > disambiguation field. I know there are some wildly diverging views > already about what should go in that field even now, but all these > arguments can be judged by the simple criteria of whether it helps > disambiguate between similarly named artists. Changing the intent of > that field to be something else would -- I fear -- create a situation > where many people want this comment to contain specific bits of > information formatted in a particular way, which means we'll end up > having to write a style guideline for it, etc.. > > Perhaps I'm thinking a bit too much in doom scenarios, I just wanted > to express that I like the clear goal the comment has now, and that it > works very well for that purpose right now. > > -- kuno / warp.
I too think that changing the purpose of the comment field (artist/release group/release/etc. - they all have the same purpose) would turn into a mess where different people have their own idea on what might best "describe" an artist(/release/etc). I believe that disambiguation comments should only be used in the scenario where there is currently ambiguity, and for nothing more. I think that given the way that artist comments are currently displayed in the server it would add a lot of "clutter" to the UI if we now had a comment for each artist, even if they were accurate descriptions. Instead, I think that folksonomy tagging would be best way to "describe" an artist(/release/etc.). They're specifically designed to be weighted by popularity, which helps with determining which is the "right" description, and in the case where a users opinion differs from popular opinion they are always able to determine which tags have been submitted by them and use those instead (either in Picard or possibly on the site). Kuno suggested that we have the comment field show up when adding an artist, but I think between comments and tags, giving users the ability to enter tags in right away would be more beneficial - of course there's nothing stopping them both being displayed though. In general though, I feel that we need to emphasize the fact that we support folksonomy tags. There are a lot of possible uses for that kind of data, describing an artist is only one. Pavan Chander // navap
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