[vorbis] (Classical) Request for Standardization of expanded TAGS

[Nemo - earth native]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 12:06:28PM +1300, John Morton did utter:
> On Thursday 06 December 2001 22:42, Jonathan Walther wrote:

> > DISCID
> > 	since the EIN, ISBN, etc numbers aren't to be reliably found
> > 	on the CD, nor is the catalog number reliable, the FREEDB
> > 	index hash should go here
> 
> CDDB index hashes are not unique - not really a problem if the album's entry 
> is in your local cache, but a hassle if you're looking it up in the server. 
> At the very least, you need to include the catagory the cd has been placed 
> in. 

I was going to bring this very point up. I'm currently doing a fairly
hefty statistical look at the freedb database (immediate summary - approx
10% of the database are non-unique discid's. Note that they might yet
be the same disc, but existing in multiple genres)

The cddb discid is generated as follows:
 First byte: a checksum calculated from track offsets
 Next two bytes: total CD length (in seconds)
 Last byte: cd track count

(I question if it's even worthy to be called a hash? More like a
compound index)

Back on topic, what is the purpose of storing DISCID here?

Is it to provide a method to lookup the freedb database? In that case
you would be best advised to store the freedb genre as well. (though
not vital)

Is it to provide a unique identifier for the CD? If that is all, then
maybe look at http://www.cdindex.org/  (cdindex.org is designed as an
alternative/replacement to cddb/freedb, and provides similar lookup
functionality. It's database of tracks is nowhere near as comprehensive,
and it's application support isn't as available)

The second generation of cdindex.org is musicbrainz.org, and they
have their own "MusicBrainz Metadata Initiative" - might it be worth
collaborating and making a more commonly accepted wider metadata standard?

> 
> > TRACKNUMBER
> > 	the track number on the CD
> 
> Let's include a DISCNUMBER, too. I hate having to put that in the album.
> 

another vote for DISCNUMBER here. 

> 
> > GENRE
> > 	id3 type classification (classical, pop, jazz, blues, etc)
> 

Genres, as an idea, are great. I've not seen a satisfactory implementation
yet.

The problem as I see it is that people assume a track can only fit one
genre.  Hence we have the situation where cddb/freedb has only 11 genres -
and over half the total database are in two genres- rock and misc.

id3 genres have 80 or so genres? This provides a good selection,
but runs into the problem of choice. (does Bob Dylan fit into
folk? rock? blues? country? jazz? ...for any given track any of these
might apply, or something else yet again)

cddb protocol5 (which freedb supports) allows an arbitrary GENRE tag to
be stored with the file. I seriously know people who would consider
Bob Dylan to be a genre all on his own. Pink Floyd too (are they
rock? progressive rock?  psychadelic rock? instrumental rock? ... all
of these would find a place in different tracks, and some tracks could
easily claim more than one)

The whole point of genres is, IMHO, to have a /small/ number of
generalised styles for rough categorisation. But I see no reason why be
limited to /one/ genre.

Might I recommend that the GENRE field be able to contain multiple
entries (comme deliminated should be fine!) ... and, while not *forcing*
a limited range of genres (as cddb did), have a small but varied range
of recommended genres to choose from (a couple of dozen at most would
seem sufficient to cover everything)

(ie, ever heard the Pink Floyd track "Echoes" ... I don't need a genre of
"progressive psychadelic experimental instrumental rock"... I'd want
the multiple genres of "progressive rock", "instrumental", "rock",
"psychadelic pop" ... maybe some of those are even too specific? :)

> While it's sensible to map id3 genre classifications into the GENRE tag if 
> you're converting tags, it's more sensible to treat each genre tag as a 
> fairly arbitary keyword that you can run a text search on. One man's metal is 
> another man's hard rock, after all. 

aye. Agreed - and I think allowing multiple genres, and having a range
of recommended fields would go a long way to smoothing this.

.../Nemo

PS. I could write much more on genres - I've spent much time thinking
about them with regard to my pet playlist idea (it's not a project till
I have more than IRC logs brainstorming it ;)  ...I could write more,
but I don't think it's needed or wanted. :)

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