Cataloguing again

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

When I am anxious or bored I often like to sort and organise things. It tends to be both soothing and exciting (it can be both! calms other anxieties, engages interest in a different direction).

My two main sources for this these days are LibraryThing and MusicBrainz (both of which collections are currently very incomplete). Currently the latter is much more intense since so far as I know its data is built manually by volunteers rather than sourced from already catalogued resources elsewhere.

So far I have yet to find anything I tried to put on LibraryThing needing more than a little tweak to be well-matched, while many of my albums, particularly the older ones, don't seem to be present at all and need adding by me personally. This has caused a definite slowing of my progress (where the incompleteness of my LibraryThing is more to do with not previously being able to get a paid account). Right now I'm stuck about this album, which I added myself but which probably is not meeting the best current standards in how it is laid out. I will fix that later, when I can. Earlier I was using the Picard music tagger while writing to try and clear up some of the mess the CDDB made of my collection when ripping the albums and it seemed to think the tracks belonged in a different album with an identical (but better compiled than mine) tracklist. That album is newer, but put out by the same company and looking a whole lot like a reissue under a new name. Especially as those albums are both number four of a series. I'm not sure if I should trust my deductions and claim those as related titles, one being a reissue of the other, or if I should seek confirmation. Perhaps by writing to Decca since the copy I have seems not to be listed in their catalogue now. It would still be a problem since MusicBrainz does not seem currently, from my limited exploration, to support marking an album as a renamed reissue of another. Plenty of other relationships but not that one.

I may have to engage in community participation. Or more study. Either's good.