Brouillard by Brouillard on Brouillard
April 3, 2022 11:47 AM   Subscribe

 
A couple others I know of
  • Express Rising has two different self-titled albums, and two different albums named Fixed Rope.
  • Bola has an album that everyone writes as Shapes but the actual name is a bunch of shapes (many of which aren't in Unicode)

  • posted by aubilenon at 12:17 PM on April 3, 2022


    Also, international releases with the same album name and release date but different track listings. Or somewhat different mixes of the same tracks... So you end up with same artist+album+track names, but different bytes.
    posted by kaibutsu at 12:21 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


    I bet these are all very similar to problems that librarians have been dealing with forever. And I bet (but I don't actually know) that a librarian would argue: it's much more important to make a work findable and retrievable than it is to perfectly honor every creators' whimsical naming habits within the catalog itself.

    Imagine trying to grapple with these names using typewritten paper index cards! We're actually in a better position than ever to make useful catalogs of even the least systematic and most disparate collections.
    posted by Western Infidels at 12:35 PM on April 3, 2022 [6 favorites]


    This is hilarious. Puts me in the mind of how Apple Music’s recommendation algorithm can’t even be bothered to distinguish between two bands with the same name. In the past Apple has served me new music by Frank Black, Metric, Rasputina, the Residents, and Leggy, which has not been by the same Frank Black, Metric, Rasputina, the Residents, or Leggy that I listen to.
    posted by ejs at 12:36 PM on April 3, 2022 [9 favorites]


    I realize Brouillard's not really the focus of this post, but if you're interested in atmospheric black metal, Brouillard's an interesting artist to check out. As far as I know, she plays and sings everything on the tracks herself. The name, incidentally, means "fog". As far as I can tell, the actual lyrics aren't her actually just saying "brouillard" over and over again, however, the bio on her label's website is:
    Brouillard brouillard brouillard, brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard.
    Brouillard brouillard, brouillard, brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard, brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard !
    Brouillard.
    Brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard. Brouillard brouillard brouillard, brouillard brouillard brouillard brouillard.
    Brouillard, brouillard, brouillard...
    To which I can only say, chapeau brouillard.
    posted by Kattullus at 12:43 PM on April 3, 2022 [6 favorites]


    What's your favourite Brouillard track, Kattullus?
    posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 12:49 PM on April 3, 2022 [3 favorites]


    💥☠️💣🌀👊 by KMFDM, commonly known as "Symbols"

    came out before emoji so what i only above is the modern approximation
    posted by glonous keming at 12:53 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


    And I bet (but I don't actually know) that a librarian would argue: it's much more important to make a work findable and retrievable than it is to perfectly honor every creators' whimsical naming habits within the catalog itself.

    Librarian here, and, yup. As the International Federation of Library Associations puts it, the first principle of cataloging is "convenience of the user. Convenience means that all efforts should be made to keep all data comprehensible and suitable for the users. The word “user” embraces anyone who searches the catalogue and uses the bibliographic and/or authority data."

    Or, if you prefer the pithier S.R. Ranganathan, "Save the time of the reader."
    posted by box at 12:57 PM on April 3, 2022 [3 favorites]


    Oh dear... I did not know of Navidrome and now I'll probably lose a month to setting up (and completely obsessing over) my own music streaming service... :D

    Thanks?, Ten Cold Hot Dogs.
    posted by bigendian at 1:03 PM on April 3, 2022 [2 favorites]


    Notable, two projects listed are by the same creator. Master Boot Record & Keygen Church.
    Different permutations within the same space, MBR is more in a synth-metal/classical symphonic chiptune metal direction, with albums like C​:​\​>COPY *​.​* A: /V & C​:​\​>DEFRAG (complete with a capture-the-flag style puzzle for some albums for a bonus track, or a full bonus album in the case of WAREZ (copyright issues, naturally)).

    Keygen Church is more synth baroque symphonic metal, big sweeping pipe organs & the like. Both very good stuff if you're into those as genres.
    posted by CrystalDave at 1:05 PM on April 3, 2022 [7 favorites]


    I'm rooting for you bigendian, just as long as you don't pay some dorkus 200 million bucks to "just ask questions" on your platform.
    posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 1:05 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


    Led Zep's 4th album was informally called "Zoso" round our place.

    Sigur Ros's '()' was often referred to by a vague mondegreen of their lyrics that I can't remember now.
    posted by ovvl at 1:14 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


    There have been at least three reasonably well-known bands called X
    posted by potrzebie at 1:21 PM on April 3, 2022 [3 favorites]


    As the owner of a massive MP3 library, I know these edge and corner cases all too well. The issue of artists having multiple names/bands changing their name, I refer to as the Frank Zappa Problem. As a Zappa fan, I have Zappa albums released as The Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, The Mothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, The Mothers, Zappa/Mothers, Frank Zappa and the Ensemble Modern, Frank Zappa and the London Symphony Orchestra, and just plain ol' Frank Zappa.

    My solution to this, and related issues with other bands and artists, is what iTunes/Apple Music calls the Album Artist field. (Apparently, in the ID3v2 standard, this is the "Orchestra" tag.) The Album Artist for all my Frank Zappa albums is set to "Frank Zappa" and the Artist tags for each album is set to the artist/band name the album was released under.

    Related, it seems that I'm the only nutjob out there who is particular about sort tags. Maybe it's because I spent a lot of formative years in libraries, but I refuse to let any media player library sort artists by first name, so every artist releasing music under their real name (or a pseudonym in the Fistname Lastname format) gets Artist and Album Artist sort tags putting the name in Lastname, Firstname format. David Bowie goes under B. David Thomas goes under T. Why online music stores don't do this by default is mind-blowing and infuriating to me.
    posted by SansPoint at 1:21 PM on April 3, 2022 [7 favorites]


    I don't want to dismiss the author's concerns because I sense a kindred spirit, but about half of their concerns can be swept away with the suggestion that one considers filenames a suggestion at best, a way of disambiguating a file. (01.mp3 in an album folder, at worst) The important metadata lies in the file tags themselves, which are less limited.
    posted by everdred at 1:29 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


    Related, it seems that I'm the only nutjob out there who is particular about sort tags.

    To your joy and my wife's eternal frustration I assure you that you are not. (although in my case I eventually defaulted back to firstname first, because so many bands are pseudonyms: Tull, Jethro feels wrong.
    posted by Shepherd at 1:37 PM on April 3, 2022 [6 favorites]


    I was instantly reminded of the chasm between the fan-interpreted names of songs, and the actual track listings on the physical album "Hairway to Steven":

    This album used no actual song titles when originally released; each song was represented by an absurdist, often scatological cartoon printed on the vinyl record's label and in the CD's packaging. In the years since, fans have extrapolated the songs' actual names by cross-referencing this album with official and bootleg recordings of the Surfers' live performances

    (inscrutable glyphs, and individual tracks lovingly dissected here, views are not necessarily my own)
    posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 1:43 PM on April 3, 2022 [2 favorites]


    Yeah, a lot of this works OK with a robust metadata system. Both Discogs and Musicbrainz have systems up to the task, although of course they work only as well as users' submission and moderators' control does.
    posted by jackbishop at 1:55 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


    or a pseudonym in the Fistname Lastname format

    As long as you file Helen Love under H, since that is the name of the band - and coincidentally also the name of the frontwoman.
    posted by grahamparks at 2:17 PM on April 3, 2022 [4 favorites]


    I recently noticed that the mp3 server software that I've been using for 15ish years, currently known as Logitech Media Server, doesn't fully support unicode. At least I think that's the problem. It manifests itself most noticeably by refusing to include several tracks from Bon Iver's 2016 album 22, A Million. Several of the song names include unicode characters - they're all listed here - and some of them are just ignored by this software with the end result that the track listing is incomplete despite all of the songs being present in the directory for that album.

    On a similar note, I've been recently frustrated by the challenges of automatically adding accurate song lyrics to mp3s. I use MusicBee on some of my computers and not only does it struggle to get lyrics for some very well known songs but some of the lyrics it does get include metadata e.g., song title, artist, album, "chorus" or "bridge" labels. Those are are both frustrating problems (and very much "first world problems," too!).
    posted by ElKevbo at 2:38 PM on April 3, 2022


    SansPoint, you are not alone. Because both my roommate and I are this way, I kind of assumed everyone was. I guess the fact that we're both Library workers AND music fans may have influenced this thinking.
    Shepherd, that should probably be Dull, Jethro (OK, well then we'll just have to agree to disagree.)
    I have to say more irritating than missing metadata, is poor or incorrect metadata. One memorable time I had to change the genre of the music from Spaghetti plate. No I can't recall what album or musician this was.
    posted by evilDoug at 2:52 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


    I love the genre of posts which are "Dear database designers/programmers who are assuming some set of invariants about $THING: Don't."
    posted by that girl at 2:56 PM on April 3, 2022 [7 favorites]


    As someone who deals with large amounts of data in custom formats professionally, I have two semi-stock mini-lectures for new junior team members that my longer-serving coworkers have heard so many times they just roll their eyes and walk away when I get started on them.

    One is Metadata Is Important. If you're creating a file format that's going to be used by anyone other than yourself on a purely temporary basis, it should have some mechanism for holding rich metadata. There's so much badly-organized digital information sitting around, because somebody at some point didn't think it was important to build in the capability for any sort of metadata, believing naively that "the filesystem takes care of that, right?" No, it really doesn't. The purpose of a filename should be to provide a unique human-readable name for an inode within a particular directory (and in some cases, to link multiple related files together semantically—but I'm open to arguments that this is kinda icky too). And that's it. If you find yourself overloading the filename with a bunch of stuff—if your format requires a naming convention for filenames (!!), you are probably doing something wrong and should take a step back and think about what you're doing.

    Second is Don't Reinvent The Data Model. There aren't very many cases where you need to reinvent a data model or schema from scratch. It's super, super rare that you're the first person in history ever to deal with a particular type of data, be it music recordings, technical reports, log files, aerial photographs... whatever. There are data models (I use the phrase "data model" here to refer to basically lists of properties/fields and associated types and sometimes choice lists, e.g. Dublin Core) already in existence for most types of data already. Don't reinvent the f—ing wheel. Does the Library of Congress contain something like this already? If so, somebody with a PhD has probably already put some thought into what kind of metadata should be associated with it. It's probably worth at least looking hard at what they've come up with for inspiration, if not just to directly copy it.

    If you're using a structured serialization format like XML or JSON, it's often pretty easy to encode metadata right alongside the payload data, in a way that consumers that don't care about the metadata will just ignore.

    If you're dealing with packed binary data that really needs to travel as its own file, XMP Sidecar files work reasonably well. (Yeah, they're XML, and yes, XML is ugly, but often someone has already absorbed the pain for you by writing a library that generates/parses them.) And, at least in my work, lots of data already has sidecar files anyway (e.g.)... adding a second one isn't all that bad. Wrap it all in some well-understood container (don't reinvent that wheel either) if you really need to have it all in one file.

    It would be nice if OS filesystems handled metadata better. Resource forks were/are neat! (So were NTFS Data Streams, and BeFS's extended file attributes, and similar features in basically every modern FS.) But for a bunch of largely dumb reasons, We Can't Have Nice Things like metadata at the filesystem level and guarantee that it will survive transmission between heterogeneous systems. Sadly, the people responsible for this situation are mostly dead or retired, and beyond the reach of any punishment I can devise. So it's on modern developers to at least not make the situation any worse.
    posted by Kadin2048 at 3:01 PM on April 3, 2022 [13 favorites]


    I can only really use one mp3 player, an app written in Perl called gmusicbrowser. It's the only one that lets me assign multiple genres to a track (useful for DJ mixes and those in-between bands). It's so perfect for me, that of course I had to stop using it for a long time when the developer took about six years to put out the latest release and GTK2 became unmaintained about a year into that stretch. There's a GTK3 release now.

    I'm a big fan of the Album Artist tag, though I find myself wanting a better way to deal with Compilations and having a zillion Artist entries with one song and a "Various Artists" Album Artist. Makes it hard to scan by Artist, but thankfully gmusicbrowser (and some others, IIRC) allow me to set some minimum number of songs to filter out, so I can say "show me artists with more than one song." Unfortunately this isn't available on my phone, but Android and music players is an entirely separate rant. Land of contrasts.

    I was instantly reminded of the chasm between the fan-interpreted names of songs, and the actual track listings on the physical album "Hairway to Steven":

    I'll try to check when I'm at my apartment next, but I'm pretty sure I still have my recorded-from-LP cassette from 1988 and the song names like "Horse Peeing" me and my friends decided were the right ones to use.
    posted by rhizome at 3:36 PM on April 3, 2022 [2 favorites]


    It's the only one that lets me assign multiple genres to a track (useful for DJ mixes and those in-between bands).

    Quod Libet (Linux, Mac, Windows) supports this as well, is actively and consistently developed, and is otherwise flexible in a number of ways.
    posted by everdred at 6:05 PM on April 3, 2022 [2 favorites]


    Related, it seems that I'm the only nutjob out there who is particular about sort tags.

    No, you really aren't. Although I am still frustrated by the lack of support for them in a lot of software (Apple developed the ID3 TSO* tags, AFAICT, and uptake by non-Apple actors is pretty disappointing). Five years ago I went looking for Android media players that would respect sort-tag metadata and, well, I'm still searching.
    posted by jackbishop at 7:43 AM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]


    There are entire genres of music that use purposely obtuse, or impossible-to-search-on-Google names for bands and albums because they specifically don't want their scenes to be found or to expand. Russian witch house comes to mind, with groups called "(((0)))" specifically for that reason.
    posted by jordantwodelta at 9:48 AM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]


    I scrolled through TFA and all of the comments too, without seeing a single reference to the absolute howling shitshow that is metadata for any music recorded before about 1960, or any music written for any kind of ensemble bigger than a 1950s-or-later pop band, or any kind of music where the whole work is customarily more than a single track, and came up utterly empty-handed.

    You people who are bitching so hard, you have no idea how good you've got it.
    posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:44 AM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]


    These posts are always fun!

    To borrow an old joke from XKCD (or perhaps older than that), I'm pleased to announce my new DJ collective:
    '); DROP TABLE artists;

    It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why so many entire albums were just missing from my dedicated kodi server. It just silently ignored anything with nearly any international character in a file name. Like an idiot, I started systematically renaming things (after backing up the originals) only to give up half way through and switch to playing music from less bad devices. But, so much of my music collection has bad metadata, I can't imagine trying to actually find anything except through directories and file names. It's not ideal, but it's less bad than most other things. I imagine it's harder for people who don't think of an album as the obvious sorting category.

    Being reasonably searchable is something that I wish people making up cute acronyms in my field spent more time thinking about. Finding online images to throw into a talk at the last minute to represent the "MUSIC" (scientific) "instrument" is a pain in the neck. Same for the NEAT telescope, the PAPER telescope, the PLANET project, the SPAN network.
    posted by eotvos at 11:23 AM on April 4, 2022


    I sorta want to make a Brouillard cover band named Baudrillard and just change all the lyrics and titles to Baudrillard. Jean Baudrillard would have loved that.
    posted by jrishel at 1:45 PM on April 4, 2022 [4 favorites]


    My spouse has written a technical book entitled "Ruby Cookbook" and has jokingly suggested that he could also write a food cookbook with the same title to cause humorous confusion.
    posted by brainwane at 9:40 AM on April 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


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