[vorbis] TAG-mess

[Craig Dickson]

David Mitchell wrote:

> You Know Who wrote:
> 
> >>ARTIST
> >>        role fulfilled by COMPOSER, LYRICIST, PERFORMER, ENSEMBLE,
> >>        CONDUCTOR, AUTHOR, PRODUCER, and ARRANGER tags.

Which he calls "simple".

> 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.

Your suggestion has come up before and Jonathan has already rejected it
quite firmly. This fact, all by itself, allows me, with a fair degree of
certainty, to predict that Jonathan will shortly complain that you
haven't been reading the whole thread and therefore have nothing of
value to contribute. (Unless, of course, he reads this message first,
and decides to sneakily "disprove" me by not posting his already-written
flame. In that case, of course, he will have allowed me to manipulate
him, so he loses either way.)

> 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?

This is the part that's still puzzling me. Tags are optional, and in the
real world, they aren't used all that much, or all that well. I end up
creating or fixing the tags in most of the MP3s I download. So why does
Jonathan see value in "standardizing" something that nobody is ever
going to enforce in software, and that most users will never know about
or bother to comply with? As far as I can tell, he just has an emotional
attachment to his little structures, and a rather childish desire to
make everybody play by his rules.

> 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"

That is simultaneously the funniest and most accurate statement in this
entire thread.

The rest of your message was wonderful too, but in the interest of brevity
I'll only comment on the final paragraph, which I think sums it all up
nicely:

> 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.

I've been trying to find a way to say this since the last thread on this
topic, two months or so ago. You've put it very well. Jonathan seems to
want this sort of distributed database where every piece of music comes
with its own complete record, and then you have a program that can index
and search your entire collection (or, via a P2P file-sharing system,
everybody's collections) without the need to put it all in a
conventional database table. It's an interesting idea, but it's crazy to
think that very many people are going to give a damn about it or
participate in it, and therefore it's ridiculous to try to establish it
as a "standard" that all Ogg Vorbis users should adhere to.

Well, so much for the "consensus". I think the discussion over the last
day or two has shown that any such thing exists only in Jonathan's mind.

Craig

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