Appendix A. Glossary¶

The words this documentation uses on purpose. A term is defined once, here, and means the same thing everywhere else.

Music and the library¶

Term	Meaning
Album	The original studio release (album, EP or single) that a song is filed under. A later re-release never replaces it.
Alternate	A video of a song that is not its Primary: another cut, version or presentation of the same song.
Artist	A person or a group that performs or is credited. A group's members, a backing band and a side project are separate artists, linked by relations.
Audio	The music file that matches a video. A video with no audio yet is a to-do, not an error.
Collection	A film, television show or video game that has its own songs. Songs of a collection are filed under it, not under an album.
Disambiguation	The words from a video's title that tell it apart from other videos of the same song.
Ident	A short piece of MTV's own broadcast, such as a bumper or a promo. It is kept apart from songs.
Library	The VeeJay folder of audio, video and NFO files, together with the database that describes them.
Primary	The one video kept as a song's main video. Every other video of the song is an Alternate.
Role	Whether a video is the Primary or an Alternate.
Song	One recording by one main performer. A cover by another artist is a different song.
Song group	Every video with the same album artist, title and track artist. The performer counts, so a film song covered by two artists is two groups.
Video	One YouTube video. Every video belongs to one song.

Term	Meaning
Anchor	An artist identity established by hard evidence: a MusicBrainz match by recording credit, one of our own videos' channels, or the owner's word.
Chain of trust	Trust flows from an anchor through the links that verified pages publish. A data point is verified when a verified page links to it.
Data point	One fact about an artist found by a search, such as a Wikipedia page or a social account. It is a candidate until it is verified.
Identity score	A number from 0 to 100 for how well an artist's identity is established by verified evidence.
ISRC	The International Standard Recording Code, which identifies one recording across platforms.
MBID	A MusicBrainz ID: a 36-character identifier for an artist, a release group or a recording in MusicBrainz.
Review item	A disagreement or a doubt that a person settles before a value is written.
Unverified	A data point found by a search whose page has not yet been shown to belong to the artist. It never counts toward the score.
Vendor	A kind of outside identifier, such as a Spotify artist ID or a Wikidata ID, with its format and the way a link to it is built.
Verified	A data point whose page has been examined and tied to the artist by an anchor or by a link from a verified page. Only verified data points count.

Term	Meaning
Platform	A service that holds playlists, such as YouTube, Apple Music, TIDAL or Spotify.
Playlist	An ordered list of songs or videos on a platform.
Synchronized playlist	One playlist and its copies on each platform, kept the same by VeeJay.

Term	Meaning
Blueprint	The data dictionary and the reference definitions, stored as data in the database. Everything else is generated from it.
Field key	The permanent identifier of a field. It never changes, even when the field is renamed.
Migration	One ordered script that moves the database from one known state to the next.
Promotion	The step that moves a row from staging to the core after checking that it satisfies every rule.
Reference data	The fixed lists of allowed values, such as countries and the choice lists.
Rule	A check that the database enforces itself, with a number and a test that tries to break it.
Staging	The loose area where raw data waits before it is identified. Nothing in staging counts as a fact.

Term	Meaning
slskd	A program that searches and downloads on the SoulSeek network and can be controlled through an API.
SoulSeek	A peer-to-peer network where music files are shared.
yt-dlp	A command-line program that downloads video and audio from video sites.
Zensical	The static-site builder that produces this documentation.