Quote from: Latios212 on August 10, 2020, 05:53:04 PMSo my question to you is - do you see this problem of composer mis-attribution on sheets with the new URL on them? For the others, it's a known issue we will take up when we replace the old sheets, but for recent sheets with the new URL we should make sure that's fixed ASAP. One thing to note is that, as you mentioned, for the newer tracks that are clearly based off of some of his old compositions (example), we are sure to attribute him after the primary composer.
It's hard to say, because I can't find the difference between this "old URL" vs. the new one. I can't find a timestamp or anything that'll tell me if certain arrangements are just old, I can only guess based on my own personal recollection on how long I've seen them on this site (which is very, very rough), or the quality of the arrangement itself. Some have very erroneous note spelling and aren't properly beamed (likely didn't know how to use Finale or whatever software they used), and so it leads me to believe they're just "old."
Furthermore, I don't know what "old" means. How recent were these new policies in place? Are we talking the last five years? Ten years?
I was hesitant to actually provide examples before, but since both of you provided them, I guess I'll point out a few. For example, just recently I found four tunes credited to Koji Kondo under New Super Mario Bros. for DS. "Walking the Hot Desert," "Walking the Plains," World 1, and World 3 (the first of these three are two-piano arrangements) all credited as Koji Kondo, when, as I pointed out in my post, he only wrote one composition, and and none of these are that composition.
Another one I found was the Mega Mushroom arrangement, and this I was able to somewhat pinpoint to five years ago, and it also credits Kondo, when in fact, this one was written by Asuka Hayazaki (Maiden name: Asuka Ohta).
Even the "King of Hyrule" one is a bit wrong, as it credits Kenta Nagata when he played no role in the Breath of the Wild soundtrack. It's a composition that comes from Koji Kondo, and it was arranged by Manaka Kataoka, Breath of the Wild's primary composer. This one can't be an old arrangement, as the game came out three years ago.
Another set of examples I found were under Super Mario Advance, which all credit Yukio Kaneoka for the new music exclusive to this remake. The problem is, not only is this wrong, Yukio Kaneoka hasn't had an active role on any game since F-Zero in 1990. Now these, I found, were from about 4 years ago (all arranged by the same person). From what I gather, the sound composition for the first Super Mario Advance was handled by Masami Yone and Kenichi Nishida. I spent less than a minute Googling this to find that out
And I think that's really the crux of the problem that I bring up. Sure, there could be "lack of enthusiasm," but how? If someone is spending hours and hours transcribing and arranging these tunes (even the worst ones take some amount of time), does it really hurt to just do a quick Google search to credit the right person? Fact is, this person must've spent some time Googling something, as that's a highly specific credit to give. Yukio Kaneoka is a rather old staff member at Nintendo who worked on games such as the original Mario Bros. arcade game and Donkey Kong.
Quote from: Yug_Guy on August 10, 2020, 05:55:15 PMAside from that, it can be extremely difficult to pin down the original composer(s) for a given song if the game has multiple composers and no official soundtrack release. Nintendo is pretty infamous for this, so it's no surprise that there's a lot of misinformation as to who composed what piece. It can be pretty easy for someone not in the know to take a cursory look at sources and come out with the wrong info. It's not surprising that Koji Kondo, one of Nintendo's most famous composers, gets a lot of songs falsely accredited to him.
Yes, I'm aware of that. Like I said, Nintendo has left many of their OSTs unreleased, so it remains difficult to say in some cases. However, sites like vgmdb are quite helpful in this regard, as they often credit each composer (when they know). also, Nintendo has released a few compilation albums in the mid-2000s where they included tunes from games like Wind Waker, Animal Crossing, and Luigi's Mansion.
This is how we know that Kenta Nagata wrote the "Great Sea" tune, as well as Dragon Roost Island, and it's how we know that Koji Kondo wrote Grandma's Theme.
I focused my energy almost entirely on Koji Kondo, because I didn't wanna spend an entire day on this, but there are other composers who get falsely attributed to other tunes as well, as mentioned above.