[vorbis] album portion of the tags request

[Jon Shiring]

I wanted to post publicly my problem with Jonathan's proposed album 
requirements.  Although I do apologize, since this thread is too big already.

The idea that as a requirement one should be able to identify the exact CD 
a track was ripped from is not a valid requirement in my book (not for the 
tags at least), and I hope I can explain why.  Without knowing the exact 
way Jonathan wishes to accomplish this, I must resort to what I hope is 
fair conjecture.

One way to do it would be to limit the ALBUM tag so that there is only one 
entry listed will eliminate the ability to list all the albums that a track 
has appeared on.  Knowing that a track was on 4 albums is far more 
important to me than knowing only that user X ripped it from some 
particular album.  An alternative is to add yet another new tag to say 
which album the track was taken from, but I don't think the solution is 
even more tags (although I admit that is the extent of my disagreement with 
this solution).

Another alternative then is to use some CDDB or Songprint/Musicbrainz entry 
to identify the song.  I object to CDDB being in the tags because a CDDB 
entry is a computer-id and not a human id.  That's what we will have the 
structured metadata (which has yet to be designed) for - computer data, 
non-human type data (among other things) that is to be used and not 
displayed verbatim.  Don't push metadata into the tags just because the 
metadata hasn't been designed yet, use it as the excuse to design the 
metadata.  We've suffered from bad designs to ease simplicity with other 
formats, let's not repeat the mistake.

Addendum: Anyone who proposes caching a Songprint, Musicbrainz, or other 
audio fingerprint in the file obviously doesn't understand the goals of an 
audio fingerprint: to properly identify a song without having to refer to 
tags.  To cache a fingerprint accomplishes the same thing as storing the 
title, artist, etc. in the file.  The data is no more reliable.

So as not to be criticized as being purely dismissive, my proposal is to 
earmark "identifying the CD it came from" as a feature to consider when 
planning the structured metadata.

Jon

<p>--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.