Contribution questions

[C0rn3j]

1. How to deal with instrumental songs?

How do I do the lyrics content? Just {instrumental}?

2. How to deal with singles without album?

For example Six Shooter by Coyote Kisses. Do I just create C/Coyote Kisses/Coyote Kisses/Six Shooter?

3. How to deal with varying names for the artist/album/song?

There can be special characters that are used somewhere and not elsewhere. For example Bôa's tracks seem to be marked Boa.

---

The resolutions should be added to the Contributing page imo
https://github.com/Lyrics/lyrics/wiki/Contributing

Also, the formatting there is ugly, can I get wiki access so I can touch it up?

[snshn]

Hello.

1. I think instrumental songs shouldn't be in this database, since nobody would be looking for lyrics to those in the first place, and keeping empty files is not necessary good for the tidiness of the database, in my opinion. It also may cause frustration, having files without lyrics in a lyrics database... reminds me of those pages on a couple of top-visited lyrics websites where they have a page for the song, but no lyrics, stating "no lyrics available"...

2. I've had to think long and hard when I was adding Black Velvet by Alannah Myles -- it's tricky because I'd like to keep the strict structure for the ease of parsing, at the same time I wouldn't want to "make things up", but perhaps since the artist is usually much more likely to have a self-titled album, than an album matching the name of a single without having that single on it, I'd suggest using the C/Coyote Kisses/Six Shooter/Six Shooter file path, that's as much as could be achieved using my logic and imagination so far, maybe more options/suggestions will come later, we can always move those files around and re-generate the website. Each file is supposed to have a metadata underneath the lyrics as well, so perhaps this will be solved by putting information indicating that that song's an album-less single there.

3. Another great question. So the file names shouldn't matter as much as lyrics do, but perhaps keeping the original spelling is the right way of naming files. Since it's a multi-lingual database, utf-8 shouldn't be avoided in file names. Sometimes files can't contain certain characters, due to limitations of file systems (slashes tend to cause the most trouble, from my experience). Once again, metadata should solve this problem. In short, lyrics.git has a format called LMML (Lyrics Meta Markup Language), which can be used for both readable legal annotations (authorship, copyrights), as well as for parsing. I'll explain more in upcoming PRs featuring metadata for lyrics files. And I personally found MusicBrainz being irreplaceable when it comes to finding out authentic information about releases, artists, and song names. E.g. https://musicbrainz.org/artist/ca1dcba2-792c-4550-abf2-7b45396e81ca

Was about to ask your permission to extend the Q&A section as a result of this issue before reading the suggestion, thank you for suggesting to do the same.

I'm glad to see enthusiasm about this project, I'll provide wiki access to you in a bit.

[C0rn3j]

1. I think instrumental songs shouldn't be in this database

I just closed the tab with my long response to this on accident, yay...

I think it should have lyrics, for example you might or might not want your music player to play instrumentals at a given time. I originally said <instrumental> but didn't realize that's a comment when unescaped.

Let me post lyrics.wikia.com reasoning for having them in:

Instrumentals have no place on a lyrics site, do they?

    LyricWiki is not just a database of lyrics. We don't aim to provide absolutely complete and comprehensive discographies, but we do endeavor to provide information and links to other sites about artists, releases, and their songs. As such, pages for instrumentals do serve a purpose on our site. 

    People may also hear of a song title and look for it, either directly on the site or through a webservice, not knowing whether it is an instrumental or not. If a page has been created, they then know that the song is an instrumental and does not have any lyrics, instead of just getting no result. Yet another reason for creating pages for instrumentals is so that these will be entered as such in digital music players. That way, one can distinguish between instrumentals and song pages that have been created but have no lyrics entered as yet. 

    To create an instrumental page, place {{Instrumental}} within the <lyrics> tags and delete the language parameter from the {{SongHeader}} template. Everything else should be done as on a regular song page. For an example of a "(near) perfect" instrumental page, see Pink Floyd:Love Scene (Version 4). 

2. The artist is usually much more likely to have a self-titled album

Hm, that might be the better way to do things then.

3. Sometimes files can't contain certain characters, due to limitations of file systems (slashes tend to cause the most trouble, from my experience).

I'll be wanting to add POP/STARS by K/DA so let's solve that one. I suggest to use a glyph that looks like / but isn't, for example ∕, and just have the webserver handle the replacement in searches.
EDIT: I see this is already in the FAQ. Whoops.

I've touched up the wiki page for contributing and added 2. to it, will add 1. and 3. when those are settled.

[snshn]

1. The rule of thumb that got inspired in me after experiencing many lyrics websites and going through various databases is that what's heard in the song should be in the text, and what's not heard in the lyrics shouldn't. Thank you for quoting lyrics wikia, I didn't know that they explained their decision of including pages for instrumental compositions. It makes sense, especially following the logic that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm thinking that including a unicode symbol representing something like a musical note or some international sign which means "absense of text" (if such symbol exists) could work, but at the same time we could have files which contain no lyrics but only metadata, perhaps having a boolean flag representing instrumental composition set to true, something like:

____________________
Is  instrumental

or even use an array for Is, containing various properties, like so:

____________________
Is  instrumental,  single

3. Great minds think alike Ü

P.S.
GitHub hides <anything> due to Markdown's support for HTML tags, and GitHub only has a couple whitelisted, <br />, and a couple others, if I recall correctly.
And if you use Firefox/Chrome, then something like Ctrl+Shift+T or Cmd+Shift+T on Macs should "unclose" the previously closed tab and your content should be still in there.

[C0rn3j]

What would the properties be for? I don't get what 'single' would be for.
Also it might simply just be "Instrumental"

Am aware of CTRL+SHIFT+T, but I usually close about 50~ tabs at once, so I rather rewrote it than dig in there and hope it's still intact.

As for a unicode symbol - 🤫 🤐 🙊are the best I could find, but wouldn't it be enough to make sure "Instrumental" is the first tag if it exists? It'd then be clear at first glance rather than deciphering cryptic emoji

[snshn]

It's a shame that unicode symbols now get converted to emojis on major platforms... back in my days we used to have ASCII pseudo-graphics...
I think empty file with metadata on the bottom would work for instrumentals, since if certain parts of the song sound like distorted speech, it may be worth to provide an empty file showing that the track has no vocals.

[snshn]

Here's what I can tell now about questions 1 and 3 mentioned in the first message:

1. no text works just file, the website builder adds "(instrumental)" after links to those files, can be seen here I'm still open to adding something like Instrumental true or Type Instrumental, Cover or Is Instrumental, Cover (to make it more readable)

2. –

3. Unicode filenames are fine but personally don't see them a must. E.g. the song can be named "Love" but in metadata writing it as "Løvé" would let programs and the website render it as "Løvé", while the filename will be easier to type in the terminal/URL for most users. It's probably worth doing it so for artist names, but album or song names can be less unique (hence look better in git status and other places)