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  #1  
Old Feb 18, 2010, 05:18 PM
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Default Track Data Overhaul: Where Are We?

And is there anything I can do to help? I know this has been planned for a while, but I'm having trouble finding any solid info about the status of this project.

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In the meantime I have some input towards fields to use on the revision of the tracklist table (assuming we would still have one) which would relate through to the individual tracks. Otherwise, these would be applied as fields on the track title table... Language & Type

Language simply defines the primary language of the tracklist. In the case of an original tracklist which contains track names of different languages, the language should be based on the country of origin for the album.

Type defines any special characteristics of the tracklist, and we may even benefit from a dropdown standardization much in the same way we have for the scan titles (e.g. "Original", "(Original) Corrected", "(Original) Translation", "Sound Test", "Game Scene" etc.). "Original" can be assigned to multiple tracklists per album, in the cases where a soundtrack has a multi-language tracklist.

When displaying titles normally, we could show it like "English Sound Test", but could shorten "English Original" to "English*" (or maybe replacing the asterisk with a graphic or having the tab a different color) and "English Translation" to just "English".

The "default tracklist" for anything could automatically be decided by the user's options based on both a language preference and a type preference, defaulting to an order or precedence if either does not exist for an album. So If my default is "English" and "Original", it will try to look for "English*" first. And if that does not exist, fall back to, say, "English". And if that does not exist, it would fall back to, say, "Japanese*". My example's complicated, but I could work out real details even in query form if need be.
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Old Feb 18, 2010, 07:04 PM
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I don't know whether or not we need to go to this level of detail to categorize a tracklist or not. My argument against it would be that it's extra complexity that won't be used in most cases where you just have an English and a Japanese.

We should have a way to mark the original (as in what appears on the case) tracklist though.
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Old Feb 19, 2010, 10:11 AM
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I want to make sure I'm not making my proposition sound more complex than it is. For most albums we would just have the following populated:

Tracklist 1: Japanese (language field), Original (type field)
Tracklist 2: English (language field), Translation (type field)

It seems we would need an extra column to mark a tracklist as being the original anyway, so my proposition just adds a little bit of additional flexibility.

Also, by having a segregated language field, we can handle language options programmatically.
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Old Feb 19, 2010, 10:19 AM
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Oh, I see what you mean, and you're right, it's just a slight expansion above marking the official type with a checkbox.
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Old Feb 19, 2010, 12:01 PM
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I would absolutely love an "official/original" marking for tracklists. Countless times I've seen albums with only English tracklists and went "ok let's add the jp tracklist! *wastes 5 minutes looking for it* oh fine it was in English to begin with..."

And I'm thinking a sort of "checked for correctness" flag to mark tracklists as I double check them could help. Sometimes you have the jp/original tracklist but it isn't 100% correct and a flag that tells the editors "it's reliable" may be useful, otherwise I have to recheck with the scans every time (I rarely remember what albums I've checked in the past). This may bring more problems though.

Last edited by Dag; Feb 19, 2010 at 01:43 PM.
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Old Feb 19, 2010, 02:08 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dag View Post
And I'm thinking a sort of "checked for correctness" flag to mark tracklists as I double check them could help. Sometimes you have the jp/original tracklist but it isn't 100% correct and a flag that tells the editors "it's reliable" may be useful, otherwise I have to recheck with the scans every time (I rarely remember what albums I've checked in the past). This may bring more problems though.
I've thought about this exact thing as well and while it would be useful it would perhaps send some strange signals to users, that only certain entries and tracklists are considered to be good, when of course hopefully users expect all to be so.
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Old Feb 19, 2010, 02:48 PM
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Sounds like a good idea, but should it be a flag for "correctness" or "possible incorrectness"? I know we already have an option for albums something along the lies of "unsure of info". It would probably be good to make it all consistent as far as positives and negatives.
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Old Feb 19, 2010, 02:49 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by seanne View Post
I've thought about this exact thing as well and while it would be useful it would perhaps send some strange signals to users, that only certain entries and tracklists are considered to be good, when of course hopefully users expect all to be so.
I agree the general public doesn't need to know these minute details, so maybe the flag could appear only to editors and up or such. Plus it could help the staff when accepting/rejecting edits for known good tracklists. I'm thinking this should apply mainly to original/jp tracklists, this isn't important for translations.

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Originally Posted by Kaleb.G View Post
Sounds like a good idea, but should it be a flag for "correctness" or "possible incorrectness"? I know we already have an option for albums something along the lies of "unsure of info". It would probably be good to make it all consistent as far as positives and negatives.
Good point, what about both? Default for all tracklists we have could be 'neutral - most likely correct', then 'positive - correct (I checked with the scans/etc)' or 'negative - tracklist comes from some not-too-reliable place, recheck someday'. Or something along these lines, keeping it simple. Oh and user/timestamp info of who validated it would be good too.

Last edited by Dag; Feb 19, 2010 at 03:03 PM.
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  #9  
Old Feb 20, 2010, 07:36 AM
Cedille Cedille is offline
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Wouldn't it be possible to add the language tab on a disc to disc basis? I want to check the translation by clicking on the tabs and compare the Japanese and English tracklists, but for a multi-disc album, it's a bit painful to scroll up and down the page... Sorry in advance if it's only me who does that.

Last edited by Cedille; Feb 20, 2010 at 07:56 AM.
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  #10  
Old Feb 20, 2010, 01:34 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cedille View Post
Wouldn't it be possible to add the language tab on a disc to disc basis? I want to check the translation by clicking on the tabs and compare the Japanese and English tracklists, but for a multi-disc album, it's a bit painful to scroll up and down the page... Sorry in advance if it's only me who does that.
You are not alone Cedille, right now I just use Firefox tabs with EN/JP tracklists in each but that'd be very helpful.
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