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

[John Morton]

On Friday 07 December 2001 15:13, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 02:57:55PM +1300, John Morton wrote:
> >On Friday 07 December 2001 14:39, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> >> Sorry. the ARTIST tag is crufty baggage we shouldn't be shackled to til
> >> the next millenium.  It has to go.  Sooner the better.
> >
> >Well, that's your opinion. I don't see any reason why these different
> > field sets can't live together, after all, you don't have to use them.
> > Personally I'll go on using the ARTIST tag where it suits me, and as I
> > can use arbitary tags as much as I like, there's nothing you can do to
> > stop me.
>
> You can use an ARTIST tag all you want.  But OGG is not MP3.  Don't be
> surprised if the standard-following players stop displaying your ARTIST
> tag.

I'm sure I can just patch around that silliness. I'm sure someone will beat 
me to it. You're dreaming if you think you can force people to stop using 
'artist' to mean artist.

> If people still use ARTIST, there is little incentive to support
> ENSEMBLE, PERFORMER and CONDUCTOR.  The standard will die stillborn,
> and we'll forever be limited to the toy sandbox that MP3 plays in.

If people will be too lazy to switch from ARTIST to something more specific 
if you leave it in, what make you think they'll do the right thing if you 
remove it? I gaurantee you everything that was in ARTIST will end up in 
mislabled into PERFORMER instead - all you will have accomplished is to have 
renamed ARTIST to something else and pissed of half the user population in 
the process.  

Unless you can come up with a general tool that will transform just the right 
substrings of the artist field of id3 and cddb to appropriate artist 
components in your vorbiscomment proposal, then artist might as well continue 
to live as a field. Here's a hint - you can't do it. 

If you want people to use these tags, you'll need to make it falling of a log 
easy for the implementors of tag editors and players to add useful support 
for them, and write some apps that demonstrate why more specific tags are 
actually useful to users.

If you hacked opennap to support searches by arbitary fields in oggs and 
demonstrated the merit of this to the world by pulling up all the tracks 
composed by Mozart or all the songs remixed by Dave Clarke, then users might
have a reason to take the extra time tagging files. Until then, all those 
tags are just dead weight.

John

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