[mb-users] Long works and classical music: ideas for overcoming the track dominant approach

Hi list,

In the past couple weeks I've entered my classical CD collection in MB with
the help of MB Picard, the MB web iterface, patience and a lot of Internet
search queries.

My conclusions so far are that MB is by far the most useful audio media
annotation system available today.

However, the "track/recording dominant" metaphor does not allow enough
support yet for classical works or other lengthy contemporary works in
which the tracks are nothing but "smartly chosen pointers into a single
work", similar to the metaphor of a bookmark in a paper book.

Today, for works that span more than one track, MB cannot yet:
(a) determine whether a work has been completely recorded on a release
(b) return collections of related tracks that contain complete recordings
of a work

Consider for instance the following release:
http://musicbrainz.org/release/875add80-0977-41e7-8321-a9f0552384c5
This release is a reissue on CD of a vinyl release.
Track 1 corresponds to the 1st movement of a concerto, but track 2 combines
3 movements of the same work.

A track-based approach should require the creation of an unrelated "MB
Work" consisting of the combination of the 3 movements.

A second more complicated example is the following release:
http://musicbrainz.org/release/2f5f23b0-19b9-4f18-9371-6e715e5cd1c6
I have the music score of one of the concerti grossi (you can find them on
IMSLP). I can tell that there are no real movements in the work but rather
tempo indications, so the tracks have been arbitrarily assigned by the
recording engineer to have meaningful pointers so the listener can select a
fragment of the work. In this case, adding works per release will create a
huge mess and will be hard to maintain as it will always be an arbitrary
set of movements (parts in the score).

How could we introduce into MB a richer expressiveness when describing
works and their constituents, and when linking recordings and works, beyond
the one-way recording-to-work association?

I have a number of ideas, but probably this reflection is already on-going
for a while, e.g. (1) marking a set of recordings and work parts (however
independently) as being a complete set of parts (recordings) that represent
the work; (2) adding precedes/follows relationships between parts (similar
to the track editor when adding a release; (3) allow adding a directed
sequence of movements to be associated to a recording (see my first
example).

Any opinions?

Best regards,

Olivier

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