[vorbis-dev] comment field proposal

[Michael Plump]

On Fri, 12 May 2000, Monty wrote:

> (so there's the seed of a list.  Please submit obvious one's I've forgotten...)

ID3, of course, has "GENRE", which I've never once found useful but some
people might.  (The following is AFAIK and could be completely wrong...)
The genre is just a byte or two which gets mapped via a lookup table to
some "official" genre list.  I personally think it would be better to have
just arbitrary text, since the list of genres is likely to end up somewhat
silly and biased towards western music types (According to XMMS, ID3 has
things like "Booty Bass" and "Dream" but nowhere to possibly fit my Ninja
Tune CDs, which really deserve their own genre :)  Lookup tables have
their benefit if everyone used them and if all music was easily grouped (I
could search my downloaded .ogg files for all "Industrial" songs, or
whatever) but I really think arbitrary text is better.

I was also thinking of some sort of...VERSION(maybe?) tag?  Say, for
example, I have 8 different versions of Orbital's "Nothing Left" (I
do!)...  It might be nice if I could set the artist and title to that and
then in some other field, put "Tsunami One Remix".  I could always cram
that in the title, but...  I'm not sure.

So those are the only unmentioned two I can think of and I'm not even sure
myself if they should be included.  I'm leaning towards yes for both of
them, but they could end up just being extra clutter.

I wish CDs had something like an ISBN number.  That would be nice to have,
too.

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