Where this comes from

What you own, what's on each record, how long each track runs, what you played last Tuesday — that's read straight from your own music library. It's exact. We don't guess at it, we don't improve it, we don't touch it. Your collection is the one thing in here that isn't an interpretation.

Everything else is the knowledge around the record. That's a different kind of thing.

Release years, credits, the story of an album, the tags that let you find things — none of that ships with a music file. It exists because, over decades, collectors sat down and entered it. Personnel from a sleeve. The right year for a pressing. A paragraph about what a record meant.

Albumary draws on their work:

Which record draws on which varies — an obscure local pressing resolves differently than Abbey Road, and the sources overlap and fill each other's gaps. What they have in common matters more than the apportioning: none of them is a corporate database. There's no company behind them keeping the records complete. There are people — the same people who alphabetise their shelves and know which pressing is the good one. It's a record shop's knowledge, written down.

Here's the part worth understanding, because it will shape how your store looks.

The knowledge is thick where a lot of people cared, and thin where fewer did. That's not a flaw in the data. It's what a volunteer archive is.

Well-documented, usually: major-label releases, canonical albums, anything with a large following. If a record has been written about, argued over, and re-pressed a few times, its details are probably all there — full credits, the right year, a proper story.

Thin, often: obscure pressings. Local and regional releases. Records in languages with smaller online communities. Compilations and various-artist collections. Soundtracks. Box sets and reissues, where the edition you own may not be the edition that got documented. Self-released and unreleased material.

So if your collection leans toward the well-trodden, your store will look rich almost everywhere. If it leans toward the local, the obscure, the deep cuts — the records you're probably proudest of — you'll find more quiet corners.

That's worth saying plainly: a sparse record isn't a broken record. It usually means you own something that not many people have got around to writing up. Which is, if anything, a compliment to your shelf.

You'll meet lines like "Nobody's written this one up yet" or "Couldn't find additional credits."

Those are literal. They mean exactly what they say: we looked, and it isn't there.

Albumary doesn't fill gaps with guesses. It won't infer a year from a filename, or attribute a session musician because it seems likely, or generate a description of a record nobody has described. An empty field is the honest answer, and we'd rather give you that than something plausible and wrong.

The store would rather say "I don't know" than make something up. Most shops are the same, and the good ones are proud of it.

Sometimes the sources are wrong. A reissue gets filed under its re-release year, so a 1965 record sits in 2001. A pressing gets mismatched. It happens, and it happens most on exactly the records you know best.

So you can correct it. Change it, and it stays changed. Your correction outranks everything else; nothing we fetch later will overwrite it.

Not everything is editable yet. Credits aren't — where a record's personnel are missing, they stay missing until the sources catch up; there's nowhere here to write them in. What you can put right is the filing: the year a record belongs to, and where it sits on the shelf — and that's where the sources go wrong most often.

Which is, in the end, the point. It's your collection. You've probably known some of these records for thirty years. If you and a database disagree about your own shelf, you win.

Albumary's supplementary information is assembled from open sources, used under their respective licences:

• MusicBrainz — musicbrainz.org
• Discogs — discogs.com
• Wikipedia — album text is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). wikipedia.org
• Last.fm — last.fm
• Cover Art Archive — coverartarchive.org

Album artwork, playback, and your library itself come from Apple Music via MusicKit. Apple Music is a trademark of Apple Inc.

If you value what these projects do — and Albumary wouldn't exist without them — they take contributions. Adding what you know about a record you love is how the shelf gets fuller for everyone.