Terminology
For the purpose of discussing Beyond Category, the word “album” is used to designate any individual catalog entry. An album can be an LP, CD, 78rpm record, etc. Also, any kind of collection of media sold as a unit is considered an album, for instance a cd box set or a double record lp.
Tracks in an album are listed by side and track. This is easiest to grasp for LPs where every record has 2 sides and multiple tracks per side. Sides are designated as numeric. Instead of side a and b, we have side one and two.
But what about CDs? A single CD has one side. Multi CD sets use the side field to designate the volume of the set. Multi record LP sets will have as many sides as the number of records multiplied by 2. (Unless you catalog the Second Winter album by Johnny Winter which was issued as 3 sides. 🙂 )
Personnel can be entered for an album on a track by track basis. Each album also has a File Artist designation. This is the basically the name under which you would find the album if you were searching through the record bins in a record store. (If you remember those…) So, The Beatles would be the File Artist for the Revolver album, but the personnel on the tracks would be John, Paul, George and Ringo – not necessarily “The Beatles”. Although as a matter of style, you could enter The Beatles for each track as well.
Names and song titles are entered on the Songs/Personnel/Labels window which has a separate tab for each of the 3 things. For convenience, in this documentation, each tab will be referred to as if it were a separate window.
All names and song titles are entered once in the database. After that, these entries are assigned to an album via lookup fields. You will enter Miles Davis in the Personnel window, and then you use the File Artist lookup field to assign his name to the Kind of Blue album.
Personnel names are optionally entered with a “skill”. The skill will be the instrument most commonly associated with the artist. The purpose of the skill field is to differentiate artists that share the same name. For instance, there is a tenor sax player named Bill Evans and a pianist named Bill Evans. The skill will differentiate the names.
This skill does not need to be entered as the “role” the artist is playing on the album. For instance, you will likely assign the skill of tenor sax to John Coltrane, but entering him as personnel for the “My Favorite Things” track you would assign the role of soprano sax.