Hacker News Reader

Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

But that's not a problem, either. In my music collection I have, e.g. tags ARTIST=AFX and FILED_UNDER=Aphex Twin. Then when you make a playlist with your favorite music player, you can just sort things by FILED_UNDER, if you prefer. What's so hard about that?

View on HN

Interesting, so you have a way of making the relationship at the end. Now I could start nitpicking about how you decide to make the link to Aphex Twin and not his name (or another nick), and how would you make that decision for any similar cases.

Note that I don't consider this issue the main problem, it's just one I hit a few times, and I wasn't able to select a correct solution.

Discogs tracks Alternative Nicks that artists use, and can help you link songs together. Here is Aphex Twin example:

http://www.discogs.com/artist/Aphex+Twin

Also, discogs will track which albums were released under different artist tags. Foobar+discogs tagger combination lets you pick, if you want to use most common general name (so all tracks are Aphex twin), or the alternative name that songs were released under (aka: AFX songs stay as AFX).

---

This is same issue as a book ''Running Man'' (yes, followed by a movie with Arnold). Was it written by Richard Bachman, or Steven King? How does your public library list book?

Same for MusicBrainz: 'aliases' http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Artist#Alias

Sure, but the answer is you just make an arbitrary decision that feels right. Same thing with name ordering and the other issues you mention. There isn't much benefit to coming up with some elaborate system of rules for these things -- after all, the goal is to create a categorization that is easy for you to find things with, not to generate the timeless perfect metadata which all humans agree is correct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com