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#1
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Submissions - Album Titles
Current Guidelines
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#2
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But i am for including the artist name in the following case: CD singles & works albums. Should it be always "album / artist" or "artist / album" ? (i am personally for "album / artist") Should we just follow the cover/spine title ? Quote:
We could include the standardization of sub-titles when there is no special characters.. -xxx- [xxx] .. But again i think we should follow the cover/spine when there are such characters. Quote:
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I will submit once more my example: You say we can use Art of Fighting insead of Ryuuko no Ken, but then we have been using Garou Densetsu for years when there is a english name: Fatal Fury. (art of fighting is a complicate case since the 3rd album use both names..) To be honest, i always stick with romanized names (this is a personal choice) It's maybe time to choose something definitive about it. |
#3
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A main title and a sub title = : Two titles of equal standing = / Here's an example of what I mean: Nobunaga's Ambition: National Edition / Romance of the Three Kingdoms Quote:
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Last edited by seanne; Feb 22, 2010 at 11:11 PM. |
#4
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Other thoughts... A large pet peeve of mine regarding titles is stuff like "X Y Z album '[name here]'". I think the display title should be well, the 'name' of the album and that the name prefixed with whatever the album is supposed to be of (usually stuff like 'X arrange album' or 'X compilation', or 'super hyper something') should be an alternate. Few seem to agree with this, however. I also prefer using artist's sites as a source for the correct title OVER how it's printed on the jacket, as the typography used on the jacket isn't always correct (such as this for instance.) This statement however contradicts my earlier one not wanting to use the katakana title of ALiCE'S EMOTiON albums because he often prints the title in the form of 'Lycoris -リコリス-' online. I just can't win can I? |
#5
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I'd like to add something to the list of topics:
-- Standardizing the mapping of monospace characters to the Latin charset equivalent I usually prefer characters such as ~ and ・ to be mapped to ~ and · respectively for translations and romanizations. Naturally, JASCII characters should always be converted to ASCII as well. The exception is symbols like ☆, although some people tend to convert those into asterisks. Quote:
What I feel is, for parts of the album title that don't refer to a trademark, use what's printed (i.e. Original Sound Track versus Original Soundtrack). Otherwise, follow the publisher's transcription style. Better yet, follow what's written on the obi (if applicable), since there's too little space there to do fancy typography or logos. |
#6
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Also I agree about characters, though I do think symbols that don't really have a proper equivalent should be kept (such as ☆.) I do think the original title should be kept unchanged, but you're only talking about this in terms of romanizations and translations, correct? |
#7
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My issue with the [... / Artist Name] thing is that the slash is often not printed on the front cover or spine. I feel we add it mostly because we follow how online stores or such list their J-pop singles and albums. Even if the artist name is printed somewhere with the slash, one can still argue it's not a part of the album title. In addition, this slash makes it harder to handle double A-side singles unless we use two slashes like [A-side track name / A-side track name / Artist Name]. We can still omit one of the two A-side track names, but considering that double A-side means both tracks are even, I'm not sure it's appropriate. For these reasons, I'd go so far as to suggest the exclusion of the artist name, but I know this is a big change, and as stated it's certainly useful in some regards (suckers for specific vocalists would certainly prefer the inclusion, I guess).
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#8
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We could do something like this: line 1: literal English translation (if original is not English) line 2: Romanized title (if original does not use Latin characters) line 3: Original title (using the characters of the original language) line 4: English translation using Western game title line 5+: alternatives Then have a display title combo box for picking one of those titles which is the most commonly used. At the very least, there would be less arguments about which data should go in the display title, and the focus would just go on which title should be displayed.
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hi~ Last edited by Kaleb.G; Feb 22, 2010 at 03:33 PM. |
#9
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Yeah, the original title definitely should be kept untouched.
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#10
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Hm, I wonder if I should have done these one at a time. Well, I'll respond to a couple now, and work my way through them.
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I see Cedille's point about the use of slash in A-side/B-side releases, but I am not sure I can think of anything better than a slash. Also, I'm in the camp that prefers the artist name at the end. A rationale for including the artist name comes from classical music. If you have a CD containing Beethoven's First Symphony, the title is just "First Symphony." However, that is not a very useful title for pulling this album from a page of other albums titled "First Symphony." So, "First Symphony / Ludwig van Beethoven" is more descriptive and useful. Granted, classical music might not be the best source for an example; there are other bits of info like conductor and orchestra that could also enhance the title, and in fact you'd probably present the search results in a different manner than we do if you were cataloging that genre. |
#11
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Personally, if some albums have too generic titles and need more distinctions, I'd take [.../Ludwig van Beethoven] as the discretionary suffix (like the one we use for iTunes releases, reprints and Limited Editions) rather than something we have to add to every other album that may already have a more identifiable title on its own, and in the worst case, can be better without the artist name. Still, I surely see why people appreciate its presence for multiples reasons anyway. Indeed, I would less mind it, on the condition we can draw up an explicit standards on why some albums need it while others not, and how to add it.
In many cases, we often copy the Japanese text from other websites and paste it in the title field (mainly because the scan to transcribe the title isn't available until later), but there are various ways for the Internet to add the artist name ([Album / Artist], [Artist / Album], [Album ~ Artist], [Album - Artist] and so on), and I'd rather standardize it, especially given that we're not based on what's printed on the scans here. My preferred solution is having a suffix box with which we can place the artist name somewhat better (color, placement, text size, etc.) and therefore we don't need to bother with the slash problem I mentioned above, because spacing is enough and better. With regard to character song albums where the fictional character is credited as the artist instead of the actual vocalist, I doubt the Hentai/Yaoi character name really matters to the majority of us (note: that's another story, when the name is a part of the title, which is sometimes hard to determine), so I'd suggest we basically omit, or at least submit it like [Name (CV. Artist)]. Last edited by Cedille; Feb 23, 2010 at 01:32 PM. |
#12
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Also sometimes in JP titles/tracklists I find this strange variation of ~: 〜. Seems non-standard so I'd change all instances to ~. Other suggestions: - Follow caps more strictly at least for trademarks or clear, consistent use of mixed case like Gigablah said (if this annoys people simple css or js magic can fix it). This means "FINAL FANTASY Original Soundtrack" and such for Square albums in glorious CAPS. Specially if the title is only written in Latin letters (FF again). - Consider separating the display/romanized/alternate (US, fan-tranlations) names and the printed title(s) in different boxes, so there is a clearer distintion (it doesn't need to be too apparent to the user, just when editting). Currently you can't tell them apart. For albums without scans or digital releases long gone, it's info lost forever. |
#13
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Thinking about it more, names in the title seems unnecessary. I was thinking about it in the sense of how discogs does it (like this or this) which wouldn't be adding the artist to the title, but simply querying the relevant artists (arrangers if it's an arrange album, etc.) assigned to the album (or displaying various if there's more than x.) Unless this is what is being discussed and I just got confused somewhere. In any case, this would be useful for some doujin albums (ones by one or two artists) and solo works albums, but it's not useful for OSTs.
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#14
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Maybe a bigger font it's needed to see the differences, try with this: ~ (monospace/asian), 〜 (weird), ~ (latin). |
#15
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Edit: It's also valid unicode (see 301C.) Last edited by Ira; Feb 23, 2010 at 04:29 PM. |
#16
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The inconsistencies with ~ (full-width tilde) and 〜 (wave dash) is due to differences in Unicode mapping. Another explanation is given on Wikipedia:
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Long story short, it's all Microsoft's fault |
#17
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I stand corrected.
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#18
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So, which of the two should we actually use? (Now that we know they both essentially mean the same thing to the Japanese.)
And I support using ~ in its place for all English/Romanized tracklists.
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hi~ |
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#20
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No, wave dash is part of shift_jis, so it might appear on older stuff. But, I honestly have never seen it used except for in some odd cases, I can't even think of any albums that use it.
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#21
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Automatically generating and appending the artist name like Discogs is a little tricky, since we'd want to apply the rules that Cedille mentions (restrict it to vocal and arrange albums with one artist). It's doable though, but I'm not sure we should go that route. Speaking of auto-generation, another thing to bring up is the addition of (Limited Edition) and (iTunes) extensions to the titles, which we can also generate. Quote:
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#22
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#23
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I think this would make things look a lot better as well.
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#25
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I really don't know what was discussed in the past so it could have been already considered (yet killed), but isn't it bad to have a dedicated line to edit capitalization and whatnot? Another justification for this is given by the necessity of keeping the album names (especially from the same series) consistent, something we already do for the catalog numbers. The current display line might have been designed for this purpose, but I think we tend to avoid having two lines where only the difference is capitalizing variation and delete one of them (and to begin with, I myself would replace one of them with the Japanese). I also prefer we redefine the Original line, because we more often than not add the Japanese title to this line, while it's not clear that the Japanese is the original.
Display: Write whatever but be consistent with other entries. English: Write the title in English. No discretion if printed on the cover. Japanese: Write the title in Japanese. No discretion if printed on the cover. Romaji: Romanize the title. No discretion if printed on the cover. Alternate: Write something useful for searching (e.g. Western game name). In case people feel uncomfortable with five lines, we can hide some lines at each album page (English is likely). This may look too complex, but in fact, we've already been submitting the Organizations in a similar way and the artist also has the Kanji and Hiragana fields. The biggest obstacle, however, is much time and energy to optimize the existing 18k albums. |
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Consistent with the information given by the publisher or consistent with some sort of guideline?
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#27
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I totally forgot that the titles of some releases were given in other languages (French, German, Korean and more), so it can be up to six lines.
Perhaps, both? |
#28
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Names in general (not just album titles -- track titles, artist names, etc) should all be split into separate rows for different languages and different variations / translations.
I imagine that's what I'll work on next, since this is a prerequisite for the new tracklist system to work. The interface doesn't need to be complicated -- I'll try to retain the feel of working with a multiline textbox. |
#29
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Perhaps titles could be made a bit more flexible by separating each title into their own div composed of a text field for language (or drop down) and text field for the title, and by allowing titles to be dynamically added and removed so only as many as necessary would be on the edit page. A check or radio button could be used to mark one of the titles as original. This would make things a little more flexible as said and perhaps a bit clearer for some.
Well, having guidelines around formatting and being consistent with publisher information usually don't go hand in hand. But I'm not really 100% clear on what you have in mind. |
#30
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