[vorbis] Re: (Classical) Request for Standardization of expanded TAGS

[John Morton]

On Saturday 08 December 2001 14:31, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 02:37:46PM +1300, John Morton <jwm at plain.co.nz> 
wrote:
> | Out of interest, does vorbiscomment have any notion of padding the
> | comment block, so tags can increase and decrease in size without having
> | to rewrite the whole file?
>
> Hmm. Why is that necessary? The files aren't that big. Implementationwise
> I'd imagine it's easy enough to consider any tag with trailing whitespace
> padded, and to fall into "keep padding" mode if there's room with the
> new tag value?

Suppose I suddenly spotted that I butterfingered the title you the Aphex Twin 
ablum 'Drukqs' as Druqks' and I want to fix it for each track. Suppose my tag 
editor failed to suck, and lets me change a field on a selection of tracks - 
but the standard vorbiscomment api rewrites all tag changes to a new file, so
I have to wait for all 29 files to be completely rewritten. 

Admittedly that's a fixed size example, but I could also be adding PRODUCER 
to all the tracks in an album after the file creation stage (oggenc doesn't 
let you add arbitary tags at creation time, last I looked.) 

One solution is, as you said, to treat whitespace at the end of field values 
as padding, but it doesn't really help you when you want to add and remove 
fields. Better to add a PADDING tag filled with white space and remove and 
add space to that as necessary. 

I'd propose it as a standard tag, but it's not meant to be human readable, so 
I think I'll just added to a tag editor implementation at some stage.

John

--- >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.