having nodes for each individual song

Can you consider this:

Users can add songs to their albums with the many fields, and one field being the version of the song.
Songs can then be reused in other albums or as a single (as a different version).
All the songs can then have their own page where all the versions of the song can be displayed and the albums their in.

This way you can have less pages, but all songs still get their own page where you can add video's, different lyrics, etc.

Here are some drawbacks to consider.

• If this is implemented, there is a 100% guarantee that data from the D6 Discogs module would never be compatible with the D7 version. There is also a 100% guarantee that you will not be able to "push" this data to Discogs.com. Of course, both of these possibilities had a slim chance of happening anyway, but this would be the nail in the coffin.
• You will not be able to create album information all at once. You would have to, first, create and save each track individually, then when you are creating the album, link to the track nodes you've just created. This creates immense problems.

  First, consider users who won't even use the Discogs.com import feature; they just want a discography module for their site. The module would be horrible to use. Nobody wants to do this; they want to fill out one form and bang, done. If the module did work this way, nobody would use it.

  Next, consider users who do use the Discogs.com import feature - and import, say, 50 albums at once. If each album has 10 tracks, that's 500 nodes that are created, including all their database calls, Drupal bootstrapping processes, etc. There's no way this could be done without PHP timeout errors. So, this would all have to be run through Cron, which has its own special circle in Drupal Hell.

• The ability to create node-to-node relationships does not exist in D7's Field API. There are, at present, at least three different (and conflicting) D7 modules to handle this: Relation, Entity API, and References. The last is the only one that actually has a versioned release (not a release candidate or beta) - and it's being abandoned.
• Nearly all of what you're suggesting is better accomplished either by using Views, or by simply creating a Song node (rather than a Track node), and having those nodes be totally and completely separate from the discography. In fact, you can do this right now.
• It might be incompatible with some other modules. For example, in D6, the Audio module created its own node type. This would mean that Audio and Track nodes would already be completely separate anyway, so making Tracks be their own nodes wouldn't solve anything. I don't know which modules do this for D7, though (and Audio is now abandoned, BTW).

Here's something else to consider: it appears that Pushtape uses exactly the system that you're recommending. If this really is what you want, it makes much more sense to make this module simply be an extension of that one. That is, it would simply import data from Discogs.com into Pushtape. I'm still looking into Pushtape, and I'll report my results/opinions.

i was thinking that (in manual cases, not discogs imports) it could be possible just by filling an album form with the track titles would publish all songs as nodes at once

Exactly, this would be how I want it to work too. And I've actually downloaded and used Pushtape (both the "installation profile" and "features" versions), and you do have to create each track and add them to albums, which is indeed not user-friendly in the least. However, that method requires some additional modules that associate nodes with nodes, and so far, those modules don't allow for doing it any other way.

I have used the Node Reference Create module before, which does exactly what we want. However, it was geared towards CCK, not D7's Fields, though it does mysteriously have a D7 version. It's also seeking a new maintainer, so I don't think it would be wise to have it as a dependency.

I'm still thinking about a solution, and of course I need to coordinate all this with Pushtape. I'll keep y'all posted.

Discogs does not treat songs as individual nodes. They are part of the "release". Think about the complexity of adding a discogs release, and then trying to link the same song node from various and previously imported releases. Sounds like mayhem. Eg. You import a Beatles album, which contains the song Yellow Submarine. You import another release, and ideally it will not create another node for the song Yellow Submarine. The import should first search for existing songs with the same title by the same artist, and if no match is made, it would then create a new node for that song. If a match is made, would one be prompted to link the two together? And what about different versions of the same song (remix, early version etc). Would we want a master release scenario then?
Do I have this correct?

Think about the complexity of adding a discogs release, and then trying to link the same song node from various and previously imported releases. Sounds like mayhem.

I agree, and believe me, I've been thinking a lot about it. Still, unless tracks are nodes, the discography would be useless for Pushtape users, so I think it has to be done if we're to integrate our projects.

I am working on a solution to this, though it may not be exactly what you wanted.

Though D7 doesn't have entity-to-entity relationships in core (and I still don't know why), there is a possible workaround: make an Album Track be a custom Field in and of itself.

This way, you can simply attack multiple custom Album Track fields to each Discography type, and it would all be handled by Drupal's form and field handlers.

Another advantage is that if you want to make a Track type, all you do is create the Track content type, and attach a singular Album Track field to it.

Since the use cases are totally different, there wouldn't be so much of a problem with data overlap on most websites.

Thoughts?

For issues that will not be addressed in the D6 version, I am going to close and mark "won't fix."

This is entirely because I want to focus on the D7 version, not because the issue is a bad idea.

FYI, I have already implemented the Tracks field for D7.

I have implemented this for the D7 version. The issue for it is here:
#2024759: Track Nodes