Robin Bowes Wrote: 
> Nigel,
> 
> Have you seen http://musicbrainz.org ?
> 
> I think what they are striving for is similar to your aims.
> 
> Look for Advanced Relationships on that site.
> 
> 

I looked at Musicbrainz with some hope but they made a decision to
store the Composer name in the Artist tag and place the major performer
name in parens after the work name in the album field.

That choice to live with the Artist, Album, track title set of tags
supported by most players removes any real value for this project.

Try searching for artist=Ludwig van Beethoven.  The results are not
sorted in any useful order.  The album names vary in content; some have
the composers name then the work and the performers while other album
names have just the work and performers.  The album names often refer
to more than one work.


There is a style guide at
http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/ClassicalStyleGuideDiscussion

Here is what the author says about having a separate Composer field and
making Artist = performer:

---
Since we now have relationships, wouldn't it make more sense to make
Classical the same as other types of music and make the artis the
performer, and use a relationship to link the composer? This would make
life easier for people looking for performances by a specific orchestra,
and would make the cover issue moot. --Trongersoll

IMHO there's no way: if an Album is all by a Composer it should
be under that composer. That it's mostly because it is also difficult
to choose wich performer it should be under. For example where do have
to stick into a Mozart concerto by Berliner with Mutter on violin and
Muti conducting...? But in case of classical compilation by Various
Artist where often the performer is clearly the main reason of the
release (ie a Gould performance or a Callas recital) I think it could
be left under performer, also because listerners are often more
interested by who's playing rather than what he's playing.

----

It is clear that the person writing the style guide wants to organize
the information in a rigid hierarchy.  This defeats the purpose of
storing the data in an SQL database and doing queries.  You don't have
to impose one heirarchy on the data and in the process suppress useful
data.


The idea that you would store the composer name in the Artist field for
some Cds and the performer name in the same field for other CDs is just
bizarre.  This is the product of an limited, inflexible mind.

There is an article on work in progress on Advanced Relationships at
http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/AdvancedRelationships

but if you read it, the purpose is rather general. 

--- a quote
Advanced Relationships is a way to represent all the "miscellaneous"
relationships between Artists, ?Albums and ?Tracks that are stored in
the MusicBrainzDatabase. For example:

* The song [WWW] Rockafella Skank by Fatboy Slim includes a sample
from the Just Brothers song [WWW] Sliced Tomato.
* [WWW] Paul Di'Anno was a member of [WWW] Iron Maiden from 1977
until 1981.
* The Metallica album [WWW] St. Anger was produced by [WWW] Bob
Rock & [WWW] Metallica.

All of this information is stored in a single table in the database,
and there is a single user interface for adding new information. In
this way, MusicBrainz has a fairly simple way to deal with extremely
complicated data. 
---

I don't see that the advanced relationships stuff addresses the basic
problems:  you can't have both composer and performer fields and there
isn't a place for a single work name as a field.

Bill


-- 
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