[vorbis-dev] The Oft Maligned comment field, initial thoughts.

[Ralph Giles]

On Sat 17 Jun 2000 Adam Scriven opined:

> Hey all. 
     Ok, so I'll stand up and be counted a newbie in this list too (just
did the 
     same for the General discussion list). I (once again) read through
the 
     archives, especially the ones concerning the comment field. 

     First, I'm not a developer, per se. I'm merely an anal-retentive
power 
     user of such things, who likes to have my music archived, and sorted. 

> In reading through the comment tags discussion, I noticed that, once
> you allow one thing, everyone else jumps in with what's important to
> them, and you start to duplicate the proposed XML MetaData stream
> unnecessarily. Having a short field for identification purposes is a
> lofty goal, but one, I think, that is harder to reach than would seem 
> apparent. One person noted that he has 8 copies of an Orbital song (pls. 
> correct me if I'm wrong, I can't seem to find the reference again),
> and so merely having ARTIST/SONG TITLE in the comment field would not
> be enough for unique identification, but to go any further leads down
> the slippery slope of "Genre's critical for me", and "What about Track
> Number". 

I'm a newbie too, but fwiw, I think Monty's decision is a good compromise.
The rest can be left to practice. And note that there is a recommended
"VERSION" field for just the situation you describe.

I suppose "DESCRIPTION" can be used for issues like the composer and so on 
in classical recordings? The "ARTIST" field is a little confusing for that
context. Should the conductor be credited as an artist?

If I'm encoding from CD, I do want CDDBID and TRACKNUMBER fields, but
perhaps they're insufficiently general to deserve mention in the formal
documentation. Maybe wait and see what extensions become commonly
accepted?

another $0.02,
 -ralph


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