[API Request] Support Multiple Album Versions

[jeffgt14]

Type of change

API extension

Proposal description

Expose a VERSION tag to add disambiguation amongst multiple releases of the same album.
i.e. [Dark Side of the Moon, Dark Side of the Moon (30th Anniversary Remaster), Dark Side of the Moon (40th Anniversary Remaster), Dark Side of the Moon (Quadrophonic Vinyl), Dark Side of the Moon (MFSL CD), etc.]

MusicBrainz ID's are great to keep the albums organized separately but the information exposing "what's different" is not there. Also, at least for the niche group of us into vinyl ripping, it's useful to see custom information such as WHO in the vinyl ripping internet community ripped the vinyl as well since it's not an exact science such as a CD rip.

Roon and Ampache currently use the custom VERSION tag for this information and I believe Navidrome may use this in some capacity as well.

Backward compatibility impact

No response

Backward compatibility

• No backward compatibility impact.

API details

I'm definitely not knowledgeable in this aspect :)

Security impacts

No response

Potential issues

No response

Alternative solutions

No response

[epoupon]

This is exactly what the ReleaseGroup MBID is for. See for example https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/f5093c06-23e3-404f-aeaa-40f72885ee3a

[jeffgt14]

Maybe I'm not understanding how everything works. I am not suggesting we change how we identify groups of releases. Simply better identify the versions of albums in that release group. Roon does this very well by reading the Version tag. Below is an example of how the same album release is identified by reading this tag

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/album-versions-issue/152114/8

[epoupon]

My bad, I just wanted to say we first need the mb release group id, which is not exposed too.
By the way, I can't find any picard plugin that populates the version tag. And I don't find any plugin that uses the disambiguation info from MB. How do people tag this in an automated way?

[jeffgt14]

Ok that would make sense too. I figure this would work without the MBID but I'm not 100% sure how it all works.

Disambiguation info should be able to be pulled from MB with this script:
$set(Version,%_releasecomment%)

This is per Ampache documentation
https://github.com/ampache/ampache/wiki/ampache6-details

I use puddletag to set Version off the folder name so I haven't personally tested the tagger script.

[dweymouth]

I would think the version (or edition, or whatever we decide on) tag would be something that most people would populate manually, if they care about it. As @jeffgt14 currently does with manual version info appended to the album title (discussed in Navidrome discord)

[sentriz]

personally I automatically set it with beets. it writes to the "Musicbrianz Album Comment" tag which is a concatenation on the mb release and release group disambiguations

[sentriz]

as @epoupon it would be nice to group releases in a release group, but for now it would probably be enough to just expose a disambiguation or version field. i think that would be backwards compatible if we did release groups, since both releases and release groups can have disambiguations