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

[Dan Conti]

Just a quick comment on this.

ARTIST should refer to the person or persons who played the piece in
question. A seperate field, such as ORIGINALARTIST or COMPOSER or something
similar would be better fit than using a generic DESCRIPTION field for a
specific purpose. Note that the scenario described also applies to covers.
On a seperate note, I would recommend at least two or three GENRE fields,
with some sort of order placed on them.

I'm not current on what kind of information CDDB and other such services
provide, but in general it's very important to populate as much meta data as
possible. Right now, a lot of the MP3's out there don't have full ID3v1 tags
even, some dont have any data in them. This just makes it a lot harder to
make intelligent jukeboxes, etc.

Naturally an ideal situation is one where you can build a playlist of all
your digital content, then pick that you want to pick a genre, or everything
by an artist, or all the live bootlegs you have, etc. Even though there is a
push to do such things with current media types, it's questionable whether
or not they will be useful in the marketplace because of the current state
of digital content.

Custom fields are good, but there should be standard fields for as much
information as possible.

-Dan


--
Dan Conti

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-vorbis-dev at xiph.org [mailto:owner-vorbis-dev at xiph.org]On
> Behalf Of Ralph Giles
> Sent: Saturday, June 17, 2000 1:23 PM
> To: vorbis-dev at xiph.org
> Subject: Re: [vorbis-dev] The Oft Maligned comment field, initial
> thoughts.
>
>
> 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
>
> --
> now subscribed to the list. aiigh! I'm being sucked in! :-)
>
>
>
>
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