The Label Field Is Doing More Than You Think
Label in the Albums sub-library is a single text field, and it's the one that separates a discography database from a listening log. The same album released on Atlantic, Re-Issues, and Rhino carries materially different mastering, liner note content, and sometimes different track sequences. A collector who knows they prefer original pressings over reissues needs to track not just the title but the specific label imprint and release country. That's what the Country and Label fields together support.
Catalog # is the final disambiguation layer. Two different pressings of the same album on the same label, from different years, have different catalog numbers — and the catalog number is often the only way to identify which specific matrix you own without pulling the record out and reading the dead wax. Combined with the Barcode field (which handles post-1970s EAN-coded releases), every album record in this database is uniquely identifiable down to the pressing.
Artist and Album Linked, Not Tangled
The template's relational split — artist records in the primary library, album records in a linked sub-library — prevents the redundancy problem that ruins flat discography lists. An artist with twelve albums doesn't repeat their Area, Type, Founded date, and reference URLs twelve times. That information lives once in the artist record. The album records carry everything release-specific: Year, Format (Digital Media, CD, 12" Vinyl), Label, Track count, Tracks, Catalog, Barcode, Genre, Style, and status flags.
Artist and Label as text fields within the album record aren't redundant with the parent link — they're there for album records that might belong to collaborations, compilations, or releases under a different project name than the primary artist's name. A side project album or a split release needs both its own artist attribution in the album record and its link back to the primary artist profile.
The Tracks field is free text, not a linked library. This is the right call for a discography rather than a music player database: you want to log the track sequence as a text block, not manage each track as a separate linked record. The Track count integer supplements it for quick-reference and sorting.
The Three Status Flags and What They Reveal
Listened To, In Collection, and Wishlist create a six-state classification for every album in the database. The combinations that matter: In Collection and not Listened To is the backlog — albums acquired before you could get to them, gifts, bulk purchases. Listened To but not In Collection surfaces the albums you know well enough to rate but don't physically or digitally own — prime acquisition candidates if the rating is high. Wishlist only is the want list.
A filter for Wishlist = true AND In Collection = false sorted by artist name gives you a curated, structured shopping list before a record fair. A filter for In Collection = true AND Listened To = false sorted by year shows you where your listening attention has lapsed.
Rating at five stars per album, aggregated mentally across an artist's linked records, gives you a quick artist-level quality signal without needing an artist-level rating field. The data is there. The analysis is yours.
The Wikipedia, IMDb, Last.FM, and Homepage URL fields on the artist profile are the research anchors. Last.FM in particular is useful for connecting your local database to scrobbling history — cross-referencing your play counts against your personal ratings surfaces albums you're playing heavily but haven't consciously rated highly, which is worth investigating.