[vorbis] TAG-mess

[David Mitchell]

You Know Who wrote:

>>ARTIST
>>        role fulfilled by COMPOSER, LYRICIST, PERFORMER, ENSEMBLE,
>>        CONDUCTOR, AUTHOR, PRODUCER, and ARRANGER tags.

Hears an idea. How about the 99% of the population that understands the
simple concept of "Artist" use the "optional" tag "ARTIST". Meanwhile,
the 1% of the population that want's a multi-dimension normalized database
of all rythmic sounds can specify the "optional" tags COMPOSER, ENSEMBLE, 
etc.
Programs which only understand the normalized data can display the
crude "ARTIST" tag when it is the only available for a song. Conversely, the
neanderthal "MP3" software can simply concatenate all
the COMPOSER, LYRICIST, etc. tags into the "Artist" display it includes. 
Perhaps
using a simple printf syntax: ("%s: %s", tag_name, tag_value).

>>
>>You need this data neither in your playlist nor prior to downloading a
>>tune.
>
>If you had read the standard, all tags are optional.  You can even
>release an ogg with no tags whatsoever.  I'm starting to feel like a
>broken record here.

That's OK. You're sounding like a broken record.

<p>>
>Which part of "all the tags are optional" don't you understand?  Oh, and
>the URL should go in an ADDENDUM tag.

Which part of "optional" DO YOU understand? Tags are always an
optional thing. The music is the primary part of the file. Why can't I
"optionly" use an Artist tag? Is that OK if I take the option of using
none of your tags?

>
>>All six artist-related tags are perfectly valid, and none of them can
>>take another tag's meaning. But instead of these six tags, a single
>>ARTIST tag would perfectly do the job.
>
>In your case, a single ARTIST tag would do the job.  If all we ever
>listened to was your little electro-midi-loop-noodling sounds, that
>would be sufficient for the standard to.  But the standard is meant
>to be useful and usable for everybody.

Hmmm. That's  a sophisicated argument. "Your music is all silly pooh-pooh.
If only you listened to <i>real</i> music would you see the need for
my perfect set of tags"

>
>>I really don't want these tags to become standard. The standards should
>>not go beyond simple tags that are required for proper "playback", if
>>one may say it that way. The whole rest needs to adapt to too many
>>different possible scenarios to become a standard.
>
>I, and many others, disagree. 

Really? Who else wants this huge number of tags to maintain?  Bueler? Bueler?

> No tags are required for proper playback,
>ergo, by your reasoning, ogg should drop tag support altogether.  Unless
>the common ogg-playing tools support them, tags are useless.  Unless
>tags are standardized, the ogg-playing tools won't support them.

Actually, since the tags are named-value pairs it's easy for players to 
simply
display all included tags along with the name of the tag. Since the name of a
tag should carry some semantic content about the tag itself this is pretty
much self documenting. People will understand if their player prints
COMPOSER: John Doe
Here's a suggestion: All tags should use capitialization appropriate for
printing. I.E.: Artist not ARTIST. Ensemble not ENSEMBLE. That way
players don't need to now anything about the tags. Well, maybe they
should know about Artist so that they can print "Song blah by Artist" ;-)>
But in general, players won't need to understand tags at all!

<p>>
>If I gave you a file foo.ogg, how exactly are you going to find out the
>artist and title unless someone has put in appropriate tags?

Well, that's kind of the crux of the biscut, now isn't it? You want people to
put in a dozen different fields specifying subtle shades of "PERFORMER" vs
"ENSEMBLE" etc. Really, you should count yourself lucky to get even a
half-assed ARTIST tag. Wanting people to spend more time composing
Metadata for Ogg files is one thing. Expecting it to happen is another. The
best you could hope for is that all Ogg encoders and players adopted your
standard strictly. And you know what would happen? Everyone is going to
leave your "ENSEMBLE" and "MEDIUM" and "OPUS" tags blank and put
the exact contents of "ARTIST" into "PERFORMER". And that's helps
anyone how?

And your suggestion to display a dialog box every time a user tries
to play a song with an "ARTIST" tag? Good lord. Do you want anyone
to use Ogg? Or do you plan to have the software nag at them about
their lack of proper documentation until they get fed up and WMP starts
to look like an easy-to-use un-obtrusive gem compared to that f***ing
Ogg software which gives you a damn history quiz every time you try
to encode a song! Not to mention rags on you every time you try to play a 
song
whose metadata came from (God forbid) CDDB!

Reference on that last one:
>>If the ARTIST tag is found, I'd advocate printing a message pointing
>>the listener to the URL of the standard for tagging, and the manpage
>>for the program that retags ogg files.

Get a grip. If you want a normalized, comprehensive database of all
classical music don't expect everyone else to build it for you. Embedded
metadata in audio streams is 99% just to display a simple artist and song
name to the user. Stop trying to make it into the card catalog of the
National Music Appreciation Society.

Ack.

<p>--- >8 ----
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