[fivre]

Maybe you can explain one of my long-burning questions: why are non-English tracks handled so inconsistently? I'll sometimes see an English translation, sometimes a transliteration (for non-Latin scripts), and sometimes the original language. It's not consistent which gets used even for a single artist, and sometimes changes to a different one.

The albums Ангедония (https://open.spotify.com/album/1HxmgR8wpc1ySplYCTNwaW or https://i.imgur.com/ndOXsgL.png) and Продано! (https://open.spotify.com/album/5kp7j9B4TDA3VfhaXz9XcJ or https://i.imgur.com/QJNjXc1.png), for example, both contain a version of the track "Рижская". The former uses the original Russian while the latter uses Rigas', which is a sort-of translation (it's an adjectival version of "Riga", which doesn't really exist in English).

https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/en.lproj/static.h... indicates that there are separate fields for each of the original, the translation, and the transliteration, but it doesn't seem like anyone actually _uses_ these, and instead just picks one arbitrarily to stuff into the main/native field. I'm not sure if Spotify even has a way to display the alternates--I can't recall ever seeing a toggle for it, though idk if I've ever actually encountered a track that includes the variants, since you can't see raw metadata on Spotify.

Is it just that music labels do a lackluster job of handling metadata? I expect this is probably the case, since classical music is similarly messy--it's a crapshoot whether the composer or performer gets used as the artist. For that I've at least seen the composer metadata field populated sometimes, but internationalization fields don't seem to be used ever.

[stavros]

It's really hard finding Greek songs on Spotify for this reason. There are many ways to transliterate (eg "ευχή" can be "efhi", "euxi", and all the combinations thereof, and that's just with two ambiguous letters) and no names are in Greek, so it's basically a game of trying to guess the transliteration for the track you want.

[notimetorelax]

I’d say software should handle this issue - you type in Greek and it should match all possible transliterations.

[stavros]

That's very hard, there are too many combinations. A better solution would be to just use the original Greek name.

[YawningAngel]

That's a good solution for Greek speakers, but a terrible solution for non-Greek speakers, who _can_ learn a "canonical" transliteration but can't write Greek

[stavros]

There is no canonical transliteration, though. Also it doesn't make sense to learn Greek like that, and nobody does in practice.

[YawningAngel]

All of this is true, but I can learn that Spotify romanizes Τα παιδιά του Πειραιά as Ta paidiá tou Piraiá (or whatever) and search for that, whereas I can't type the actual name for love nor money.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a good design decision, just pointing out what might motivate this design

[wolverine876]

While I don't doubt your knowledge, note that many aspects of European language, including English, and including the European alphabets, are in a sense transliterations of Greek.

[maxbendick]

This is an area that many parties handle differently. Streaming services, artists, labels, and distributors don't all handle translation metadata consistently. There are specs in DDEX for this, but it's a matter of support and doing the translation work AFAIK.

[bobuk]

quick upvote for examples from Yanka. I thought that I'm the only one who still listening her.