[vorbis] TAG-mess

[Moritz Grimm]

Hi,

<p>here's my €0.02 on that topic.

First of all, all those new tags are total overkill to be standardized.
They're only useful for people who both tag OGG files for a living and
listen to classical music only. Imagine what will happen when the Jazz
fans, and the Techno fans, and the Rock fans and who knows else demands
his very own, customized + standardized set of tags. And what about the
various other tags one might need when OGG is not only the common
container for Vorbis streams but also Tarkin and FLAC and MIDI and X, Y
and not to forget Z.

Then, what's the deal with 23947 standard-tags, while all the popular
players support only the ID3 set of tags by design ... I really wonder
where Winamp should display a tag like CONDUCTOR or whatever fancy
classical-only stuff you want.

The only point I see in those tags is to have a searchable and sortable
index of an OGG Vorbis music base, controlled by some sophisticated
database engine that can generate playlists, start players, whatever...
but this all doesn't have anything to do with the OGG format.

What you might want is write to the authors of tag editors and ask them
to allow you create and save your own presets, for example. Or make it
interactive! Let the tag editor come up with predefined questions and
input screens! This would lead to a homogeneous tagging of your OGG
collection, ready for a database I don't know whether it exists or not.
In the end, it's a front-end thing and not about what's written on a
xiph.org web page.

OGG needs some few standard tags. Standard means, they're standard ...
e.g. in players. Those are ARTIST and TITLE, for example - no matter how
diffuse the word "artist" actually is in this context. The tags are
optional, but theoretically you can use every single standard tag in
every single OGG file - even the ISRC tag I requested. It is useful,
because becoming a registrar costs nothing, and although nobody with a
label code really needs it, everybody has it - and it shows who, in what
country, in what year made a specific recording. (Ah, this reminds me, i
wanted to ask the IFPI when they get problems with the 2digit-year...).
Burning OGGs to CD-A means that the ISRC will be burnt together with the
rest. No need to do it manually. (Heh, not that anybody would care, but
this all is theoretical anyways.)

Back to standard tags. They should be universally applicable (in
theory), and [classic|rock|pop|techno|...] specific tags are not.
Customize your own, that's why you can do it.

I recently encoded Antonin Dvorak's 8th and 9th symphonies ... even
"TITLE" sucks there, I agree. My titles are currently "Adagio",
"Allegretto Grazioso - Molto Vivace", etc. That's bullshit, because
that's "Symphony No. 8" all the time, but I had to distinguish them
somehow. I made my choice because I want to be able to distinguish the
parts in a playlist. So this is about what the player displays in the
playlist ... no 293874 additional standard tags would have helped in
this case. (Especially because I don't want to change the Winamp
plugin's properties all the time.)

All this additional information that is useful for classical music, but
hardly anything else, should stay in the "my custom tags"-drawer. We
could discuss this again when we have XML metadata in OGG files. Players
supporting this XML metadate might have "browser windows" displaying the
content in a well-formatted and customizeable way. Having some more
things standardized at that point could be neat, but it'd be pointless
now. IMO.

<p>Moritz


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