[vorbis] Re: PROPOSAL: Sub-Tagging

[Segher Boessenkool]

> I have heard the argument on IRC that "if we allow 24 tags, soon people
> will require a jillion more, and who wants to support that?"
> 
> To those people I lay out a challenge:  find 20 more tags that meet the
> stated goals of the standard, and are not synonyms for tags already in
> the standard.  At that point I will admit the proposed standard is a
> fool's errand and will pack it up and go home.  Until then, I am not
> convinced.  I think the 24 tags in the standard cover every conceivable
> case.

To quote from the standard:

"The comment field is meant to be used much like someone jotting a quick
note on the bottom of a CDR. It should be a little information to
remember the disc by and explain it to
others; a short, to-the-point text note that need not only be a couple
words, but isn't going to be more than a short paragraph. The
essentials, in other words, whatever they turn out to
be."

20 more useful and different tags?  Let's do 26:

        A=the 1st character of the alphabet
        B=the 2nd character of the alphabet
        C=the 3rd character of the alphabet
        D=the 4th character of the alphabet	
        E=the 5th character of the alphabet
        F=the 6th character of the alphabet
        G=the 7th character of the alphabet
        H=the 8th character of the alphabet
        I=the 9th character of the alphabet
        J=the 10th character of the alphabet
        K=the 11th character of the alphabet
        L=the 12th character of the alphabet
        M=the 13th character of the alphabet
        N=the 14th character of the alphabet
        O=the 15th character of the alphabet
        P=the 16th character of the alphabet
        Q=the 17th character of the alphabet
        R=the 18th character of the alphabet
        S=the 19th character of the alphabet
        T=the 20th character of the alphabet
        U=the 21th character of the alphabet
        V=the 22th character of the alphabet
        W=the 23th character of the alphabet
        X=the 24th character of the alphabet
        Y=the 25th character of the alphabet
        Z=the 26th character of the alphabet

This might be just some funny comments to a certain Sesame Street song, or
a handy cheat sheet for the rest of the comments (which are ROT13 encoded,
as part of a new fantastic DRM scheme).

And if I write

        Soup=good food

as a comment tag, that's my business.  I may have very good reasons to want
that tag in a certain song.  And you may want

        CELLO PLAYER=Mr. J. Doe

or

        COMPOSER=JS Bach

but those have *exactly* the same status as my 27 tags:

it all are short, informational messages, to be read by the user, and *not*
to be parsed by the user's media player program.  And yes, a media
player that
allows you to manage a collection of tracks can use tags like ARTIST,
TITLE, ALBUM,
TRACKNUMBER, as a poor-man's alternative to it managing its own
database.  But it
really should do the latter.

All in all, your OPUS tag is exactly equivalent to my SOUP tag.

Cheers,

Segher

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