Issue 3352: Duplicate

New issue submitted

Assigned changed to “anselm” (previously “None”)

I think I will assign this to Anselm as a policy question. If one recording might have been reused by two otherwise quite different CDs would we eliminate this as a duplicate or just keep a full set of recordings for each CD?

As a matter of principle it would of course be best if a recording had only one database entry even if it shows up on different albums (this seems to happen a lot, for example, with some of the Jimmy Shand stuff which crops up not only on several Jimmy Shand albums but also on “Best Scottish Dance music” type samplers). In practice, however, this may be difficult to enforce, especially with older material.

From a practical POV I think we should re-use existing recordings as far as possible when entering new albums. I realise that this makes a tedious task even more tedious but it is good database hygiene. I don’t want to force anyone to go back and check everything that is in the database already, but presumably this is a task that could at least partially be automated. One possible snag is that dance lists can now refer to recordings, which may make it difficult to remove a recording (in favour of another existing one) when there are dance lists using it, but this is similar to the problem where a duplicate dance can’t be removed because it is part of a dance list; there should probably be some sort of API support to automate this because right now only I can change other people’s dance lists.