[vorbis] tags in comment field - why?

[Glenn Maynard]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 10:07:16PM -0600, rillian wrote:
> Hmm. Maybe I missed some of this. The short answer here is that the 
> vorbis tag format was intended to be quick and informal, and is clearly 
> labelled as such. As is clear from the plethora of argument, doing 

It doesn't really matter how it's labelled; users aren't going to see
that.  (They probably wouldn't care, either.)  If it's widely implemented,
it's going to remain in use indefinitely, and we end up with multiple
tag formats if we don't plan ahead.

> metadata properly is *hard* and a separate problem.

Is there any reason not to specify a good tag format, which can later
be put in a real metadata stream?  (The tag format--an XML DTD, for
example--seems to be a separate issue from where it's stored--text
comment block or metadata stream; it seems it shouldn't be difficult to
put it in the comment block now, and later allow putting them as streams
as well.  There may be some less obvious problems I'm missing, of
course.)

> We've always said we'd like to have a separate metadata format, one that 

Let's be careful about what we're talking about.  There are lots of
kinds of metadata (tags, lyrics, a picture of the artist's dog.) I'm not
suggesting we need arbitrary, inline metadata now; just good tagging.
If there are metadata streams later to put information about particular
parts of a stream, great.

The hardest part of a good tagging system is defining the tags ("title",
"track"), and we have to do that anyway. (I've seen the discussions about
this; I'm not suggesting any changes to these, here.)

> does it's best to be all things to all people. Where that belongs is in 
> a separate logical ogg bistream, mixed in with the vorbis data. I think 

I havn't read any specs recently and I'm quite out of date; I thought
XML was already in use.  That doesn't really matter to me, though; XML
is nice and lets us avoid specifying anything at a low level (\r or
\r\n?) and parsers are readily available, but the point is that the
current stuff will need to be replaced, and it'd be nice to avoid a lot
of deprecation later.

> One route I've been pointing out for the past year is to just import the 
> MusicBrainz format. I think it needs some work from the design point of 
> view, but there's a ready implementation of the parser and an 
> established database to query.

Looking quickly at the page (http://www.musicbrainz.org/MM/mm2.html),
it's XML.  Almost all of it looks like tag descriptions.


-- 
Glenn Maynard

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