[vorbis] Re: The authority of Jonathan

[Craig Dickson]

Jonathan Walther wrote:

> You have a wrong impression.  I'll try to correct it.

Please.

> Monty has final say.  Theres never been any question about that.
> 
> When I have rejected peoples suggestions flat out, its not because I am
> saying it, it is generally because Monty has already said, in email or
> on IRC, "no way!".  I have been working within the constraints of what
> Monty has already said he would accept.

You may have a clearer sense of Monty's views than I do; he hasn't said
much in this discussion. It is interesting, however, that Segher, who is
also one of the developers, seems not to agree with you about what is
and is not acceptable, based on his several messages today.

> All proposals for keeping the
> ARTIST tag have violated his dictum about subtagging and imposing
> structure on the tag data.

Not all of them. Some people have simply rejected your idea of having
separate PERFORMER and ENSEMBLE tags, and letting ARTIST remain in their
place. (Aside from the name, this is essentially the same as just
dropping ENSEMBLE from your proposal.)

> When there is a sensible proposal, and a sizeable number of people have
> sniffed it over and said "this is good", its likely Monty or Jack will
> quietly stick it up on the website and say "this is a standard we
> approve of".

That's what I expect too.

> As long as people like you who want XML metadata galore

I've never advocated XML metadata. The most I've said on the subject is
that you were overestimating the difficulty of supporting it. This was
a couple of months ago.

> are trashing any proposed tagging specification

Not "any" proposal; so far, just yours. For that matter, I have
relatively few objections to your proposal. Mostly just the excessive
detail. You want to standardize a bunch of things that hardly anyone
will ever use, and the separation between PERFORMER and ENSEMBLE really
irritates me, because the distinction is arbitrary in too many cases.

I've got an even better example of that, by the way. Back in the '70s
and early '80s, there was a very popular pop, with five to seven members
at any given time, called the Electric Light Orchestra. The leader of
the ELO has now (2001) put out a new ELO album, but now it's his one-man
band! You've said previously that a one-man band should be considered a
PERFORMER, not an ENSEMBLE, so would you say that the new ELO record
should be tagged as PERFORMER="Electric Light Orchestra"? In which case,
any file search for ENSEMBLE="Electric Light Orchestra" will find all
the old songs, but not the new ones, which seems like a bad thing to me.
On the other hand, using ENSEMBLE would be, according to your previous
statements, wrong (although I guarantee most users will do it anyway).
And if you require that any search for PERFORMER or ENSEMBLE actually
search both fields, then you've essentially eliminated the distinction
between them, and there's no point to having two separate fields.

I still think ENSEMBLE should be dropped, and PERFORMER used for every
individual or collective that played on the recording. Perhaps even
including the conductor; after all, he's essential to the performance,
and he's up on stage with the instrumentalists.

> because you don't have your own metadata
> standardization sandbox to play in, there will be no tagging standard,
> and Ogg the phenomenon will be the poorer for it.

This is not a foregone conclusion. What seems likely to me is that a
tagging standard would evolve over time, based on what real users
actually want to do and what the players, encoders, and tag editors
choose to encourage in their UI designs. Most likely this standard would
be quite simple and not include a lot of the detail that you want, but
that would only prove that your proposal was, from the perspective of
the majority of users, overkill. Furthermore, since this standard would
have evolved among a large population of real users, rather than being
dictated by the developers, a reasonable percentage of users would
actually follow it. Whether this is a "bad thing" or not is a matter of
perspective. I suspect most users would be perfectly happy with it, and
therefore, it would not be a "bad thing" to them. In other words, only a
small minority of users, presumably including you, would have a problem
with it. And you're still free to tag your files however you like, so
it's really no problem at all.

> I'm the one that originated this proposal. I'm trying to make it useful
> to enough people that enough people will tell Monty "hey, I think we
> should make this our standard."  Thats what this whole consensus gathering
> exercise has been about.

Which has certainly not built a consensus so far. If anything, the great
differences of views on the subject seem to support the opinion of some
(I think Moritz and Segher both said or implied this) that there is no
need for a standard, because different people want to do things very
differently.

> I need this standard, other people need this standard, and we've been
> doing what we can to move it forward.  If that is "self important", please
> shoot me now.

No, what I think of as self-importance includes things like telling
people that they have nothing of value to contribute (which you have
done), telling people to go back to MP3 if they don't like your proposal
(which you have done), being dismissive of music that you don't happen
to like (which you have done), constantly referring to an anonymous
"many people" who allegedly agree with you (which you have done), and
claiming an obviously non-existent "consensus" in support of your views
(which you have done). All of which radiates pomposity, arrogance, and
self-absorption.

Craig

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