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

[Craig Dickson]

Jonathan Walther wrote:

> If the duet is known by a single name, such as Marie and Per who
> together are known as Roxette, then "Roxette" is an ENSEMBLE.
> On the other hand, if you have Placido Domingo and John Denver
> singing "Perhaps Love" together, then they are each a PERFORMER,
> and you would use two PERFORMER tags, one for each.
> 
> An ENSEMBLE is any grouping of more than one performer that is known by
> a common name.

This is not going to work well in practice. There are too many gray-area
cases. Is "Crosby, Stills and Nash" three PERFORMERs or an ENSEMBLE?
There are more than just the three of them playing, after all -- it's
really a full rock group that happens to be named after its vocalists.
In practice, they are _exactly_ the same, structurally, as Three Dog
Night, who are clearly an ENSEMBLE since they have a collective name.

And what about a "band" like the Durutti Column, which is really just
one guy overdubbing everything? Is that a PERFORMER or an ENSEMBLE? The
name sounds like an ENSEMBLE, but it's really no different from a Paul
McCartney or Todd Rundgren "one-man band" record.

And what about The Fireman, which sounds like one person, but is
actually duo performing under a "common name"?

And what about something like "Buddy Holly and the Crickets" -- is that
PERFORMER="Buddy Holly" and ENSEMBLE="The Crickets"? Logically, you
would have to say so, but I doubt very many people would actually enter
it that way. They'll just put it all in one field,

So even if you could come up with clean definitions that handle all the
gray-area cases, you will _never_ manage to get all the ogg users doing
things consistently according to your definitions. And I don't see the
point of "standardizing" something if most users won't conform to (or
even know about, in most cases) the "standard".

I think the best solution is to have a single PERFORMER field that
combines the principal soloist (if any) and ensemble (if any). So all
these gray-area problems go away, and you just enter it as "Yo-Yo Ma
with the Los Angeles Philharmonic", or "Buddy Holly and the Crickets",
or whatever.

CONDUCTOR can probably remain separate, although then again, sometimes
the conductor is really the focus of interest, just as if he were a
soloist. I don't listen just to the Berliner Philharmoniker playing
Beethoven; I listen to Von Karajan conducting the Berliner
Philharmoniker.

Craig

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