Talk:Steve Albini discography

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Discographies

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Untitled

Most of these are redlinks and a lot of the blue links are pointing to something unrelated to Albini. This needs some serious editing. --Richhoncho (talk) 19:08, 10 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Split work as musician and work as engineer/producer

Albini's discography ought to be split into these two categories: recording he played on, and albums he redorded. Morganfitzp (talk) 19:10, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I know this comment is 12 years old, but this still hasn't been done.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 01:18, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Spiderland

...missing from 1990/1991 122.150.114.44 (talk) 00:05, 10 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Spiderland was not recorded by Albini. TatSu (talk) 18:08, 15 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Years in the discography as an audio engineer

Most entries are listed under the year in which the album was released, but a few others under the year in which the album was recorded (this also led to a duplicate entry, which I removed). In some of these entries there is a parenthetical comment about the year of release. This should be resolved to make the list as uniform as possible. TatSu (talk) 18:13, 15 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This section has now been changed to "Credits on other artists' releases", I guess to add artwork and liner notes which seems of dubious value but whatever.

Mainly I wanted to note that I very much doubt that, within a given year, it would even be possible to list the releases chronologically i.e. January releases before February, etc. Seems like it would be better to just alphabetize the lists for each individual year. CAVincent (talk) 05:03, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Misguided effort

This effort to list everything that Albini worked on as an engineer seems deeply, deeply misguided. He famously worked with an enormous number of bands and artists that are essentially unknown. Making this point by listing hundreds (thousands?) of non-notable acts in this article is not useful. It would be better to simply have a statement to this effect, and only including artists notable enough to have WP articles. It might be better still to limit the list only to instances where both artist and the album (or single, or whatever) are notable enough to have WP articles. That would rather more succinctly make the point that he was involved with a lot of notable works. (So, I guess my suggestion is that section start with something like, "Steve Albini worked on thousands of records as a recording engineer, and regularly worked with both famous acts and relative unknowns. Below is a list of some of the notable recordings that he worked on. This list is incomplete."

I'd also note that I'm guessing that A LOT of the bluelinks in this section are going to unrelated articles. At this point, the article would be better served by making it shorter than by making it longer. CAVincent (talk) 05:31, 18 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As much as I would love to see a complete list, I think that you are right and Wikipedia is not the place for this kind of thing. TatSu (talk) 16:12, 19 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I partly agree and partly disagree. What is misguided is two things: 1) including band discographies under Albini, when those should be under the respective band discography articles. 2) not putting production and engineering into their own Steve Albini production discography article. There are plenty of production discography lists, I don't think it's a problem to have one for Albini, even if it's thousands of entries. Not every entry in a list has to be notable, so long as it is verifiable. But that should be a separate article from albums released by Steve Albini as the artist.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 01:17, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I would be astonished if even a large minority of the entries on this list are even conceivably verifiable. Certainly no effort has been made to verify anything (at least beyond the obvious ones like In Utero, Pod, etc., where verification is in the albums' respective articles). Eventually, I expect an editor to come along and delete most of this article, and they will be right to do so. CAVincent (talk) 06:19, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Adding: I believe that all of the artists which have WP articles should have links to those articles. Preferably, there should be an wikilink to the artist's article in every year in which the artist is listed. Also, if the record is notable enough to have an article (NOT just a redirect), it should be wikilinked. This way, when the inevitable decimation of this article happens, an editor unfamiliar with indie music might at least have some indication of who/what is legitimately notable and worth leaving. I tried to do this through and including 1989, but I'm done for the night. I might tackle early- mid-90s later, but after that it's a whole lot of bands that I'm not familiar with. CAVincent (talk) 06:35, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Verification in many cases is a lot easier than you think. For instance there’s Discogs with information and even scans of album covers and liner notes. Here’s an example: https://www.discogs.com/release/570767-The-Jesus-Lizard-Pure/image/SW1hZ2U6ODcxNDkxOA== . Quoting you: »I am unable to find a RS that he produced Pure for the Jesus Lizard« (There’s even a wiki for that album, including Albini as producer). There are other sources besides Discogs, too. 217.94.132.206 (talk) 20:37, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Informally, Discogs is fine - moments ago, I used them because I was trying to remember who all was on the Gods Favorite Dog compilation. However, per WP:RSP, Discogs does not meet wikipedia's requirements for a Reliable Source due to being user-generated. I haven't seen a discussion of bandcamp, and I never use the site myself, but if I understand the website correctly then I expect it would similarly fall afoul of wikipedia's RS requirements. Other wikis, etc., are also all going to fall short. Pure is a fine example of the problem here: I totally believe Albini produced it (most likely I bought a copy at the time of its 1989 release), but if another editor challenged its inclusion on the list then I don't know how to keep it in the article based on reliable sources. And that's for a notable release by a notable artist. Most of the stuff in this article is, I expect, going to be impossible to find satisfactory sourcing. I would also note that when I tried validating just the 1985-89 part of this list last week, I found errors where items were included that he did not appear to have been involved e.g. Killdozer and Band of Susans releases that sound plausible don't seem to have Albini involved. There are surely many items on the list by unknown artists that he didn't actually work with. CAVincent (talk) 05:34, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

While Discogs-content is partly user-generated (like reviews, assignment to music genres …), much of it isn’t. Most data is transferred by users directly from their copies of LPs, CDs etc. Of course there’s no guarantee that this has been done correctly, or that users won’t enter less reliable data, too. But mostly it is really transferred directly from the product.

However, while Discogs might not be 100% reliable globally, the images you can find there, scanned from original sleeves, liner notes, labels and inserts, are! I can’t see any reason to doubt that information.

Bandcamp, as in my example for Redshift Headlight’s »If You Are Around Still«, is just a publishing option for artists, not significantly other than their own websites, Soundcloud presence, YouTube channels or social media accounts. If artists (or labels) themselves say on those channels who produced their recordings, there is no reason why this should be classified as unreliable.

You are right, though, that some people here have inserted false entries. Like Killdozer’s »For Ladies Only« – I have a copy of that myself, it’s produced by Butch Vig, no indication that Albini had anything to do with it. But it’s hard to demand proof for every entry, many were probably inserted by people owning copies and (hopefully) checking them again before putting them into the list.

But I am confident that most of the data here is correct, and I think it is not enough reason to eliminate an entry just because a quick search doesn’t find highest-standard-proof. 217.94.132.206 (talk) 13:52, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In retrospect, I kinda regret removing the Redshift Headlight entry, and I don't think I've removed anything else that I didn't research. The thing is, I've seen music-related wikipedia articles get decimated by editor(s) who wiki-lawyer the letter of our guidelines while showing no apparent knowledge of or interest in the actual music. It is an incredibly frustrating and demoralizing experience. I'd like to protect this article as much as possible, but I don't see how this attempt to make a comprehensive list is defensible against an editor determined to gut it. CAVincent (talk) 05:45, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Should note that directly citing the liner notes of an album or other record--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 00:37, 13 June 2024 (UTC) is a reliable source.[reply]