[vorbis-dev] comment field proposal

[Scott Manley]

> 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.

IIRC the band 'Primus' have a genre all to themselves ;-)

Having lookup tables for genre codes is a 'good' thing for people writing 
automatic management systems, but what you want is a system where you can 
apply mutiple genre descriptions to a track. not all of these would be genres 
but they would match the feel of the track, people could be as  descriptive as 
they liked by adding as many phrases as possible

e.g. 
'Dead Or Alive' by Bon Jovi could be "rock + Cowboy + 80's + Male Vocal"

'Birdland' from Quincey Jones' "Back On The Block"  might be - "Jazz + Upbeat 
+ Anthemic + Female Vocal + Bebop"

'Melt' by Leftfield - "Dance + Electronic + Ambient + Killer Bass + Downtemp + 
Leftfield"

Part 8 of Elgar's "Enigma Variations" - "Classical + 20th Century + Strings + 
Orchestral + Downtempo"
(Yes I know it was actually written in 1898 but it sounds like a 20th century 
work)

The idea being that the more 'genre descriptions you have, the less chance two 
people will put them  in the same genre, so by asking for multiples you ensure 
more crossover.

Of course... having number codes in a lookup table may not be a good idea, but 
perhaps having a load of 'suggested' genres for application writers, but 
encoding them as text within the field would make more sense for extensibility.

> 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.

8 versions? Clearly a man with good taste in music...

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