1. what does (p) mean?

for example on the back of the cover you get things like (p) © 2006 XXX Inc.

I know that © shoul be COPYRIGHT which is actually who owns the material, but what is (p)?


2. quite often, after a song's name you get an info like (Holdsworth/Scofield/Davis) or just one person like Holdworth, sometimes two of them...

But god, I never know what those people are actually responsible for... they never say that on the CD booklet. they just lit them after each song...

Can anybody, please explain me, what is the structure of such staff information?


I really appreciate any help as I use CD booklet information to translate it into my own Ogg Vorbis tags that I am now working on.


just a little bit of nonsence talk:

In the future I also plan to create a custom Ogg Vorbis player since Foobar seems not to support switching between displaying various tags in a box during a song's play. I was actually playing a bit with its quite complex tagging feature but it seems impossible to get it read info from my custom named tags like GUITAR, BASS, DRUMS... since simply that requires a full featured programming language to detect which tag is first and if the time has passed on to switch to another tag (currently 5 seconds) - I managed to force Foobar to give me a value every 5 seconds increasing by 1 but if I have lets say just 2 custom tags I would like to display alternatively in the caption in the main window every 5 seconds, I simply am to lazy to sit hours to figure out the right algorithm that would switch between such tags - I think there is not even a feature in the tagging system that allows to detect which tags are available theare no SELECT CASE or other Visual Basic phrases so ... simply I will have to cook my own player I am afraid

please, help... I am in the cafe

I'm not sure about 1. I have seen those when a CD is reissued. Those usually have two "dates": the original one and the year of the remasterization.

2 is the composer (s) of the song.
They are supposed to be of the same importance, regardless of order.

(P) represents the year in which the work was produced.

And that is different to when it was published?

I mean... what would be more important? What date would you use?

I never thought much of this myself.

I always use the later date, unless it is a reissue.

Actually, P in a circle -- (P) -- means Published. A work of art can be Copyrighted without being Published.

Use whatever year you are comfortable with. The actual "release date" of the original recording may be different that the Copyright or Published year.

Oh, sorry. I got confused between published and produced. Yeah, I don't know which would be best so I generally use the latest year and leave it at that.

disclaimer: I'm not a legal expert, but do have some experience with cd-publication.

The (P) (P in a circle) symbol is usually referred to as "mechanical copyright symbol".
In general he who pays for the recording (i.e. pays the musicians, studio, mastering etc.) is the owner of the recording. Usually this is the issuing record company. However the owner of the recording doesn't necessarily own the rights of the music.

The © "copyright" symbol is more common and is followed by the year of publication and name(s) of the "intellectual property" holder(s). It is used to protect works of authorship, such as writings, music, and works of art that have been tangibly expressed.
In the case of a music cd these rights are usually owned by the composer, arranger and textwriter, unless these rights have been transferred to a third party.

If you're interested, there's plenty of information to be found on the web.

A lawyer chap said that the P stands for phonogram and refers to ownership of the actual recording on the disc, whereas the C only refers to the lyrical content. I don't actually know how true that is, but I don't see any particular reason to disbelieve it, either.

Also the order of names in reference to your second question is chosen by an entirely abitrary method; sometimes it means that the first is most important and sometimes it doesn't.