DohBell

Album covers don't change with time (barring some strange rerelease). There might be thousands of possible pictures to choose for a person, and none of them the definitive one. It's just not something that's a focus of this site, but hopefully the external links listed for people will provide you with decent sources of images.

There's also that covers can be an important navigational aid. Even if you're checking out a site or store in a language you can't read, you can still identify what edition of an album you're looking at by cover.

There are plenty of sources for partial song credits out there. As an initial pass I've been using Project Hello a lot, as pretty much every song gets the biggies of Lyrics, Music, Arrangement listed. However, a fair number of them do seem off, so such errors may be copied here. In the future when giving data a second pass and searching for additional credits hopefully these discrepancies will be fixed, but for now I hope getting things mostly right is the better choice than leaving out those credits completely, or making the process of initially filling in the database much slower.

When there's a very specific date for people joining or graduating from a group, I've tried to go with that. But sometimes it's a bit fuzzier--either due to it being difficult to find to-the-day sources of changes a decade ago, trying to interpret sources through the help of Google Translate, sources disagreeing, or even the facts being clear but how to interpret them still being fuzzy. Taking W, for instance, it seems the intention of that subgroup being formed was mentioned in January, so is that the start date for the group? Or a few months later, when a name was determined? Or later, when the group actually started performing? Trying to fit complicated information like that in when all I've set things up to track are a start and end date isn't perfect.

Though there's nothing preventing any arbitrary bit of music from being entered, it's certainly not my intention to try to be all-encompassing. Hello! Project is the initial focus, though related entities like TNX or H!P graduates are obvious next steps.

98% of my sources should be listed in External Links, though there may be some cases where I did some Google search for a clarification or tie-breaker between differing sources. In a few cases I've got physical copies of albums I can get some information from.

Basically the default ordering for items, as saved to the database. For songs and albums the most important thing is release date, but there were enough tiebreaker conditions I just made the database save a list to reference both to make it easier to run and easier for me to write. It gets updated whenever a new batch of data is added.

For People/Groups, Seniority is mostly based on order of earliest known credit.

In some cases that's just the way they're written even on sources like Tsunku's site and Japanese Wikipedia. So whichever list you look at, BANANA ICE is BANANA ICE.

Due to slightly differing amounts of silence at the ends of a song, it's pretty common for a song to have different apparent lengths as a single, on an album, on a compilation. Since in this database all instances of the same song refer to one value, it may be slightly off from what you're comparing it to. When available I used the earliest possible release.

Also note how rare it is for instrumental versions to match the length of their vocal versions.

In general, unless I specifically saw it listed someplace as a song using only a subset of a group, I assumed everyone currently active in the group was in the vocals somewhere. It's possible this means there are some false positives.

The way I update the database, it's kind of a bother to do so for one new release, so prooobably it gets included without fanfare the next time I add in a new batch of data. If not, I'm probably waiting for data to catch up--the first time I tried adding a new release as quickly as possible, it became extra hassle to go back in and add in bits of data that were initially missing or slightly incorrect. Simpler to wait a few days for all my regular sources to catch up and get it in right the first time.

This is a known issue that's just yet a small enough deal I haven't decided which way to deal with it yet. This happens when there's release information for something in different formats, but otherwise it's the same version. So, "Regular" version CD, "Regular" version cassette tape, that sort of thing. Also occasionally due to a digital release, though I only bother doing that when the digital release happened before there was a physical release. It reads all these from the database, and because it's all it knows, keeps displaying the cover it knows to be "Regular" (usually from the CD) again and again, though displaying a different catalog code if available.