Linking Products to Albums

[Secret Squirrel]

This tutorial teaches how to link products to album pages. This function is reserved for Trusted Editors and above. If you are not a trusted editor, but would like an album to be linked to its products, then please post in the album's thread, and somebody will link it for you.

If you've ever linked an album to its artist pages, then this process will be very familiar to you. However, there is one additional step to the process. To start the process, select "Manage Products" under an album's edit menu.

1) Assigning Products

The first step is to assign products to the album.



The list of products to assign comes from parsing the album's product field, which are separated by commas. If a product's name contains a comma, you may have to assign it under a partial name, and link it manually to the correct product ID in step 2 below.

Just like artists, once products are assigned, the product list on the album page is overridden, and further edits their don't display.

2) Linking Products

Step 2 is linking the assigned products to their existing Title pages. You always link to a Title page, though in a later step, you can associate a specific Release. Currently, you cannot link to Franchise pages.



In this example, only one of our three games has an existing product page. Note that there are actually multiple returns for "Air", because we have a product page for the movie, the game, and the TV series. Multiple results are always returned in a Red box, which will not link unless you click the Apply checkbox. In this case, we want to link to the game Air, which is the first one.

3a) Choosing Classifications

Now our album is linked, and the links show on the album page. The final step is to classify the relationship the album has with this product. Does it contain a soundtrack? Is it an arrangement? Is it just a drama with some of the characters? This is important to allow the reader to filter the albums on a product's page to just show those of interest. Commonly, this will be used to filter out doujins.



In this example, I've selected Fan Arrange in the Classification window, because this is a doujin album containing arrangements from these games. Note that you have to manually click the Apply Checkbox, or alternatively the "Check All" checkbox before pushing the update button. The selector allows multiple choices. Presently, if you skip this step, the relationship will be listed as "Unclassified". I'd like to find a way to automatically determine this in some cases, but this will require some more thought.

Here is a brief explanation of the classifications:

• Soundtrack - Contains original music from the product.
• Arrange - Contains music from the product that has been arranged in some way.
• Fan Arrange - For unofficial arrangements such as those found on doujin albums.
• Remix - A remix is an arrangement that also contains samples of the original music.
• Fan Remix - As above, but unofficial and produced by fans.
• Vocal - A special categorization for vocal arrange albums. This overlaps arrange, so you don't have to include both classifications.
• OP/ED/Insert - This is a special classification for albums that mostly contain Opening or Ending themes, as well as other insert or image songs.
• Drama - Characters from the product are used in drama or monologue.
• Prototype - Catch-all for unused tracks and image albums.
• Sound Effect - Contains sound effects from the product. Gameplay audio tracks also qualify.
• Live Event - Recording of a live event that pertains to the product.
• Data - Contains a data track related to the product (maybe it includes wallpapers, wav files, etc.)
• Video - Video related to the product. Note that the video will mostly be music-related, given our site focus.
• Featured - I think we would use this for albums that borrow a theme from somewhere else, like maybe the Super Robot Wars stuff. I've used it a little on some of Masahiro Andoh's solo albums (PASSION FLOWER), where he uses some music from Gran Turismo, but it seemed that he was just performing his own music without reference to context. This usage may be a little controversial, so we may have to revisit.
• Derivative - Use of the music in a derivative work. Albums "inspired by the music of" would go here.

The Featured and Derivative categories will probably generate some discussion as we try to use them more. Both of these categories link in Dark Blue instead of Cyan, signifying that the relationship to the product is more indirect.

3b) Choosing Releases

During this same step, you can also choose to link to a specific release (or to multiple releases). Please see the Product Submission Tutorial to learn more about releases. If you choose a single release, the link on the album page will take you straight to that release page. For an album that links to multiple releases, I intend for this to be indicated in the display somehow, but I'm still mulling over the options.

Finally, you'll notice that once an album is linked, you can reverse propagate the products. Just like on the artist pages, this allows you to apply changes to the spelling of the assigned products back to the album's product field, so that searches and our archaic "related albums" section all stay in sync.

[Nisto]

Can Trusted Editors really edit this yet?

[Secret Squirrel]

Soon. I'll be making the changes to the code tonight.

[Nisto]

Heh, I suspected that since there's even a guide now.

I just assigned my first product, and I'm liking it Thanks Secret Squirrel.

[Cedille]

I feel we have to consider one or two more things than linking artists. For artists, we'd basically keep the assigned texts matched to the original texts (if not, click the Propagate button), but for products, it's not so simple, since the texts are also used by our DB to seek "Related albums".

For instance, the product of this entry should definitely be "NieR Replicant", not NieR, because the contents of the drama is based on the Nier Replicant side of things where the "boy" Nier is the protagonist. On the other hand, I think it's better to keep the field text as "Nier" to make it related to other entries.

I'd still sometimes use different titles for releases, if each release has dozen of albums (e.g. anime 1st and 2nd seasons), as I think 10 is the threshold for Related Albums unless we implement the page index for the section.

[Secret Squirrel]

For now, I'll strike the text advising people to use the reverse-propagate button, since using it can interfere with how the album editor set things up.

[Xiaoh]

Quite an interesting change. It's not too difficult to use, so I'll make the most of it.

[Gigablah]

Originally Posted by Cedille

For instance, the product of this entry should definitely be "NieR Replicant", not NieR, because the contents of the drama is based on the Nier Replicant side of things where the "boy" Nier is the protagonist. On the other hand, I think it's better to keep the field text as "Nier" to make it related to other entries.

The "related albums" section should not solely depend on the text in the product field anyhow, we should make it configurable.

[Cedille]

Originally Posted by Gigablah

The "related albums" section should not solely depend on the text in the product field anyhow, we should make it configurable.

I remember Carl or somebody else suggested it years ago, and I also want that badly. A possible problem I see is it could be a tad too arbitrary (since 'related' is such subjective criteria we could associate one album with tons of other album). It might have to be premise on a conversion of our album pages; we could use a tab layout or such.