ERRORS THREAD Report Errors and Omissions Here

projeKct wrote: There are currently 228 album entries with the word "FLAC" within the Releases information field. That's a lot. I think we should look at them from newest to oldest, because nowadays FLAC is pretty much synonymous with digital album, but back in the days FLAC really meant FLAC (before digital platforms such as Spotify, Youtube music, etc.) Hope I make sense? Anyway, here are the 115 ones added by TCat, which are all pretty recent (2019+) : https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=63501 https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=63502 https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=63503 https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=63504 : : : https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=69721 https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=70904 Should I update them automatically? What would be the right thing to do?

We purged the site of most of these somewhat misleading lines back in January 2021 after Jose went on his mad spree adding "FLAC download - bandcamp.com" to around 3000 albums. We replaced the 'FLAC download' bit with 'Digital album' to begin with if I remember correctly, and then did away with the Bandcamp reference altogether, since many albums are available digitally via several different platforms, not just Bandcamp.

It looks from a quick glance at a few in that list that TCat has copied his FLAC lines from the Discogs pages for these albums - and not all of them will be available on Bandcamp, though they may be available from other digital music sources.

I think we will therefore probably have to look at all these on a case by case basis rather than wiping them all automatically with the script. The ones that are available from sources other than the one mentioned in the releases section by TCat should just say the usual 'Digital album' imho, but any that seem to be only available from that one single source should stay as they are.

I think that's going to be a lot of work to do all at once, so the alternative is to just accept the situation as it is for now and just work through the lists gradually when time permits. We're never going to be able to stop members of the site adding similar lines in the Releases Information of the albums that they add in the future in any case, meaning that there will always be a few of these FLAC lines knocking about on the site no matter how many times we try to purge them.

At least what TCat has written is taken from a reliable source - it's not the same as Jose's previous misleading entries suggesting that Bandcamp downloads were only available as FLAC, which was the initial problem we had.