[vorbis-dev] vorbis tag for general music type?

[Beni Cherniavsky]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Glenn Alexander wrote:

> Hi, I am wondering if vorbis has a standard tag for general music type.
>
> I don't mean pop, jazz, etc., but something more in line with describing the
> mood of the mucic.
>
> I am thinking of games which have a soundtrack in vorbis format which could
> use the user's own repository of .ogg files during gameplay, and use the tag
> to choose appropriate music for that part of the game. For example, during
> action sequences, songs would be selected from oggs with the tag set to
> 'ACTION", and during intermission or cooldown parts of the game, music with
> the tag "MELLOW" might be used.
>
Sounds sound to me except that it's much cleaner on the namespace to use
one tag name, say `MOOD', and set it's value to `ACTION', `MELLOW' etc.
You can even have several tags: `MOOD=MELLOW', `MOOD=ACTION', so that it's
as powerfull as having separate tag names.

This leads to the idea of a game allowin arbitrary filtering of music by
tags (for example today you want to hear a specific album).  As a more
generic mechanism, I suggest just pointing the game to playlists per mood
you create any way you want (and enabling/disabling the internal playlists
- their .oggs might come from some resource file, thus disallowing you to
point to them in your playlist).

> You could certainly do this easily on a per-game basis, but I think it would
> be much better if all games could use the same repository of music supplied
> by the user  (ie their standfard .ogg collection) - as well as the ones
> shipped with the game of course.
>
The user has to specify which directories to check anyway.  This supports
the playlist idea.

> Possibly a special music server could be shared by different games removing
> the need to add soundtrack support to the game at all beyond calling the
> server to tell it what type of music is appropriate at the moment. (you could
> even wire your desktop to change the music  depending on what application is
> at the front :-)  )
>
> We would need to consult with game developers as to what tag names would be
> appropriate for a base set which developers might append with custom tags if
> necessary for a particular game.
>
> Maybe tag names like: ACTION CRAZY MELLOW SOFT JARRING CREEPY and so forth.
> These terms mean different things to different people and I am not suggesting
> we have a barney over what fits which. What types of music actually fits the
> categories is up to the end user to decide (and even totally inappropriate
> classifications could add interest to an old game :-)  )
>
Such tags are needed even if the playlist idea is used, since one might
want to create the playlists from the tags.

> I realise there is nothing stopping anyone making their own custom tags in
> ogg, but I think definition of a standard set would help interoperability.
>
Sure - but I don't quite imagine a categorization that even a majority
will settle on.  Even id3v2 doesn't specify this:

>  TMOO
>   The 'Mood' frame is intended to reflect the mood of the audio with a
>   few keywords, e.g. "Romantic" or "Sad".

MusucMatch's own tag format had some values suggested by interface (from
musicmatch.txt in id3lib's doc subdir):

> The final five entries are a little less common: Genre, Tempo, Mood,
> Situation, and Preference.  These fields can contain any information,
> but do to the interface and default set-up for the Jukebox
> application, they typically are limited to a subset of possibilities.
>
> The Genre entry differs from the ID3v1 tagging format in that it
> allows a full-text genre description, whereas ID3v1 maps a number to a
> list of genres.  Again, the genre description could be anything, but
> the interface in Jukebox typically limited most users to the standard
> ID3v1 genres.
>
> The Tempo entry is intended to describe the general tempo of the song.
> The Jukebox application provided the following defaults: None, Fast,
> Pretty fast, Moderate, Pretty slow, and Slow.
>
> The Mood entry describes what type of mood the audio establishes:
> Typical values include the following: None, Wild, Upbeat, Morose,
> Mellow, Tranquil, and Comatose.
>
> The Situation entry describes in which situation this music is best
> played. Expect the following: None, Dance, Party, Romantic, Dinner,
> Background, Seasonal, Rave, and Drunken Brawl.

Maybe just add `MOOD' (better names?) to the list in v-comment.html?


-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at crosswinds.net>
                 (also scben at t2,cben at tx in Technion)

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