Right now, there are a bunch of problems with entering instrument credits.

• A credit can't be fully entered until the instrument exists.
• An instrument is unlikely to be added unless requested via the instrument requests page, which is extra work that most people don't bother with.
• There's no way of being notified when an instrument you want has been added. (I've considered moving the requests to JIRA, partly because of that)
• It's difficult to find everything that should be fixed once a new instrument has been added.
• Some instrument credits in liner notes are so specific, that they're highly unlikely to ever be added as instruments.
• Other instrument credits in liner notes are too vague and are also unlikely to ever be added as instruments.

I would like to have instrument credits, in the same way Discogs does, e.g. track 12 of http://www.discogs.com/XTC-English-Settlement/release/3834481 has the text "Fuzz-boxed 12-string Guitar" linked to the instrument "Twelve-string Guitar".

It would mean:

• A credit can be fully entered: Simply pick the most appropriate option ("other instruments" if nothing else) and enter the actual credit as text.
• When a new instrument is added, we can easily search existing credits for the text to fix them.
• When fixing them, it would be possible to comment on the original edit to let the user know that it's been added.
• Even if it's too specific, you can enter the text.
• Even if it's too vague, you can enter the text.

If instruments are added as entities (MBS-3674) or even if we only add instrument aliases (MBS-1028), this would mean the instrument requests page in its current form is no longer needed. Instead, we could simply generate a list of instrument credits which are not aliases of the instrument. That would be a list of things which are either valid aliases and should be added as aliases, or are actually separate instruments which should be added as instruments. The only time someone would need to request an instrument would be to split something which is currently entered as an alias of an existing instrument.