> Hmm... I'm just entering some of my Techno/Dance compilations.
>
> What I miss is a field that contains the mix of the track - or
> should I make this part of the track name? (I do similiar for
> the title e.g. "extrem1 - cd 1")
Yes, it would be nice to add some additional fields to CDindex. But there
are some trade offs to be made in having these fields. For now I would
suggest you write the track title as stated on the CD or inlay. If that
doesn't distinguish two versions sufficiently well, add a comment in
parentheses.
Most client software probably won't want very much detail about the CD,
especially since CD player applets tend to display in a very tight space.
Also, many people adding data to CDindex don't know much about music,
so we can't expect them to provide very much detail during submission.
The lessons I've learned so far from looking at CDDB, the CDIN discussions
and the CDindex, as well as some horror stories from FreeCDDB are -
(1) Users are fairly good at accurately transcribing information from the
CD inlay, cover etc. to the database. They will fix typos, and merge
dupes correctly most of the time.
(2) Users (in general) have ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE what "genre" of music they
are listening to. It doesn't say on the box, so they'll guess or choose
the default setting. The best you might hope for is a divison by which
"section" in a CD store you'd find the CD in, which is a pretty worthless
piece of information anyway.
(3) Users don't want to spend a lot of time entering data. Some obsessives
will type the entire lyrics for a track, (I think the copyright issues
there are too hot for CDindex to touch) but most people won't.
This makes me believe that a good rule of thumb is - a new field should
only be added for things which can be determined by simple observation
99% of the time (if they are relevant). This rules out lyrics (most CDs
don't come with any) but leaves open Composer (for classical) and Mix
or Variant. Maybe "Label" is another interesting field, but I don't know
if this is constant for all instances of a particular album (?)
Also, the issue of dumb clients means CDindex should always offer a way
to ask for a "simplified" record, with no such complications, just
titles and artists. It might be appropriate to "merge" some fields like
Mix into the title of a track for the "simplified" record.
Now, I think I'll ramble on about fuzzy matching...
Nick.