Talk:Discogs

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[edit] Comparisons to other databases

I removed some wording that touted Discogs as being the largest music database compiled by hand by independent contributors. This promotional boasting is borderline POV, and is contentious, since Gracenote/CDDB and Musicbrainz have many more releases archived and are compiled mostly "by hand". Rather than struggling to find a sufficient set of qualifiers that allows one to say that Discogs is the biggest/best of its kind, please try to make comparisons to other databases in a more educational manner. Thanks. — mjb 18:49, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

First of all i'am member of both sites musicbarzinz and discogs. BOth sites have their advantages and "weak" issues but you can't deny the facts !

1) in musicbrainz.org 90% of info is coming from freedb by automatic importing, and most of the members realy don't like "by hand" submisions(and since you need their vote you frequently get failed moderations on this issue), they also don't allow to submit track time "by hand" so you have very few users who actually want to submit by hand because without time its useless.

2) "the biggest database of vinyls" - i dont undestand what's a problem here ? Do you have any other database of Vinilys that can compete with discogs ?

3) It's also important to understand that even so Gracenote and Musicbrainz and Allmusic have bigger databases, their database mostly includes General Popular music, not electronic like trance or house.

4) "the largest music database compiled by hand by independent contributors" is TRUE !! you dont have any other bigger database that was actually contibuted by its users !!! again music brainz members just importing !! They just COPY a freedb. thats what they are doing..I a'm sorry but i can't call it actual contribution. I am just presenting a facts ! I dont have any sentiments to any of these sites !

Vorash 20:00, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

5) Also Gracenote and freedb cannot be called "by hand" contibutions because they frequently submit CDs that alredy contain information about tracks so all you have to do is to push a submit "BUttoN" in program that sends information to gracenote or freedb site. Vorash 20:37, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Thats why in my opinion Gracenote and freedb is "automatic" contributions. And musicbrainz members as i said before don't contibute at all, because they just copying a freedb.

Vorash 20:46, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

I disagree. In those other databases, the data entry system is still very much relying on "manual" entry of information from external users. The number of tracks and their durations are not manually entered, but everything else, like titles (except in the very rare cases where CD-Text can be read from the disc), year, label, artist, country, genre, associated artists, ratings, related releases, etc. is all coming from people entering this data "by hand". As far as I know, this info is not imported from some other database and is very rarely read from the disc itself (the number of really bad errors in the data should be sufficient evidence of that!) :)

Also, Musicbrainz does contain more info than just what is pulled in from freedb and read from each disc. Users contribute additional info by hand. Have you played with Audioscrobbler at all? I was considering mentioning it under See Also, but I don't know much about its database. I think it's more of a song/track database and rating system than a release (album/single) database, so it may not be fair to compare.

Regarding Discogs being the largest database about vinyl releases, please note that I did in fact leave that statement in the article, as it is a noteworthy point and does serve to distinguish Discogs from the other databases which are more CD oriented. I did clean up the statement so that it would be grammatically correct ("vinyls" is not a word), and I also cleaned up the statement about the size of the database (it has 380,000+ releases across all supported genres, not just electronic).

I also want to be careful about singling out electronic music as being something that Discogs covers better. Yes, it is fair to say that Discogs has the most extensive coverage of vinyl releases. It is also reasonable to conclude that this means Discogs has good coverage of genres that have a lot of vinyl and vinyl-only releases. Electronic is one of those genres, but so are hip-hop, jazz and even rock, if you go back far enough. I would also bet there are more electronic CDs in Gracenote and freedb than there are in Discogs (just not categorized very well), so those databases can be said to cover electronic music pretty well, too. Who is to say whether covering more vinyl and fewer CDs equates to greater/better coverage of a genre? I don't think we have enough info to make definite statements along those lines. We can't say "Discogs is the largest database of electronic music" if it can be shown that freedb has more electronic releases that are just miscategorized.

Anyway, please don't take things too personally. I just want the article to be encyclopedic and neutral. What you contend to be facts are open to debate and do not take into account the disparate nature of the data sets being compared, so I would rather err on the side of conservatism. Nothing essential to know about Discogs has been lost so far. mjb 22:30, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

I am a member of Audioscrobbler too.Audioscrobbler is basically too sites: Audioscrobbler.com and last.fm. They have about 100,000 songs so far and probably the info on all these songs. All songs are played on last.fm (it's a radio station). last.fm has an info on albums so their meta-"database" can be estimated as 100,000 songs/10,000 releases or so (unverified) Vorash 22:54, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

This is a tricky issue. On the one hand, discogs users certainly feel that discogs is unique and special, and this unique flavor deserves to be represented here for the sake of notability if nothing else. On the other hand, there are lots of music databases on the internet (not to mention all the music library catalogs that exist but aren't accessible publicly), which render discogs (much) less unique. Several distinguishing points about discogs could be used as guideposts for establishing its "specialness" aside from touting its size or comprehensiveness:

- community involvement. I am not too familiar with the inner workings of freedb, audioscrobbler, gracenote, etc etc etc, but I think it's unlikely that any of them have forums and community involvement developed to the point that discogs does. Forum discussions are lively and wide ranging, and a number of user meetups have occurred in Europe and possibly elsewhere

- e-commerce functions. discogs has a buy/sell system (similar to ebay's "buy it now" function without the auction functions) that make it easy (perhaps a little too easy, judging by my credit card statement) for collectors to connect with distributors and other collectors looking to sell anywhere from 1 to thousands of items.

- the vinyl vs. CD debate (which mirrors the 'underground' vs. 'mainstream' debate). This is not at all a trivial point where electronic music is concerned. While it's quite possible that other databases may contain more electronic music recordings in CD format than discogs does in any format, vinyl releases are (usually) more germane to the canon than are CD releases. This is for the simple reason that electronic music releases primarily appear in vinyl formats, and if they later appear on CD, they are often edited or mixed by a DJ into a form different from the primary release. In other words, freedb might have 5,000,000 (to choose an arbitrary number) electronic music CDs cataloged, but I think it's likely that most of them will be DJ mixes, cut-rate compilations ("XXX Bangin' Trance 1997" and the like) and other 'secondary' collections put together by labels that are either much larger or located in other countries than the labels of primary release. On the other hand, the point of discogs is to catalog the primary releases in their original formats. There has got to be some uniquely notable value in that. (As you mention, mjb, this argument also applies to other genres of music in which vinyl is still the preferred medium, as well as older releases in all genres).

- multiple versions. Another example of discogs' specialness is the fact that it not only allows multiple versions of a single release to exist, but encourages contributors to exhaustively document every version of a release (down to various pressings by the same label in some instances). This allows even minute differences among versions to be tracked across international releases, reissues, test pressings, mispressings and promotional editions. This is almost the antithesis of the way other music DBs function, where the goal is to identify the CD you've stuck into your computer, tell you the titles and timing, and otherwise be invisible.

- Discogs is a uniquely (I believe) international effort. While all the aforementioned music databases have contributors in multiple countries, none are quite like Discogs. While it is based in the U.S., most discogs users are now located in Europe and focus on European releases. There is a healthy back-and-forth among discogs communities that originate in Europe, the Americas, Japan, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. I suppose this is a sub-point to the community involvement point, but the American-European tension is such an unusual feature that I wanted to mention it in its own right.

There are probably several other qualities that could be mentioned here, but I can't think of how to describe them. Ultimately, my point is that I agree with Vorash that discogs deserves to be noted as being a fairly unique beast, while I also agree with mjb that describing this uniqueness in terms of superlatives is inaccurate and uncalled for. I would almost endorse calling discogs "the Internet's best loved music community resource" or something along those lines, except that that sounds incredibly stupid. Those are my thoughts. Make of them what you will. R0m23 (talk) 23:19, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Kevin Lewandowski

"Reclusive millionaire, invented the all-purpose kitchen devil and other time-saving domestic devices"..........is this the same person ?Vorash 00:04, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What's that from?! — mjb 01:30, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

its from article about Kevin Lewandowski, i am asking are you sure it's a Kevin Lewandowski from discogs ? Vorash 10:00, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Can someone help fill out the genesis of the discogs system

I just right now added subsections for all the different version of the discogs system, it would be great if someone with the knowledge could help add some facts and fill out those sections. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.251.128.97 (talk) 11:58, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't think the 'versions' were that significant. ~~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.159.183.247 (talk) 07:29, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

The last two certainly were, and you need to include information about the previous ones to understand why that is. Lazlo Nibble (talk) 00:39, 25 March 2008 (UTC)