[vorbis] TAG-mess

[Steve Tregidgo]

On Friday, December 07, 2001 1:43 AM, Moritz Grimm [SMTP:gtgbr at gmx.net] 
wrote:
> The only point I see in those tags is to have a searchable and sortable
> index of an OGG Vorbis music base, controlled by some sophisticated
> database engine that can generate playlists, start players, whatever...
> but this all doesn't have anything to do with the OGG format.

Such an index is exactly what I want for my music collection (I'm sure I'm 
not the only person who intends to rip (or already has ripped) my entire 
collection onto one big hard disk, for my listening convenience).

Personally I'd want to be able to store a lot of that info in each 
individual file, rather than in an external database -- so if I burn a 
hundred tracks to CD, I don't have to worry about also burning metadata 
from another source.  Or if I change players, the new software can rebuild 
a database easily.  If that metadata is stored in a separate metadata 
stream, fine.  As long as it's part of the ogg file itself.

(BTW Moritz, I'm not sure if you're suggesting the metadata _should_ be 
stored externally; your comments just spurred me to speak up.  No argument 
or implication of your meaning intended ;-)

> I recently encoded Antonin Dvorak's 8th and 9th symphonies ... even
> "TITLE" sucks there, I agree. My titles are currently "Adagio",
> "Allegretto Grazioso - Molto Vivace", etc. That's bullshit, because
> that's "Symphony No. 8" all the time, but I had to distinguish them

I'm going to have a similar problem encoding the most recent "Godspeed You 
Black Emperor!" album; I'm not sure if all four tracks are best described 
by the album's title, or if there are individual track names; further, if 
each track should be split and named differently according to its part... 
hey, I think I finally understand the level of categorisation required for 
classical music!

> somehow. I made my choice because I want to be able to distinguish the
> parts in a playlist. So this is about what the player displays in the
> playlist ... no 293874 additional standard tags would have helped in
> this case. (Especially because I don't want to change the Winamp
> plugin's properties all the time.)

This is a good point -- what the player displays is important to me.  But 
it's also important to me that more detailed (ie data stored in appropriate 
fields) information is also available, perhaps to allow me to set up a 
playlist easily (even if, when it's playing, I don't see the connection 
between tracks in the player).

I guess the difficulty is in defining a set of tags that can simultaneously 
achieve these goals.  I'm pretty religious about getting all that info into 
my files (although of course I realise that many people just want 
title/artist, and that's fair enough) so I'd appreciate such support "as 
standard".

But that's the bit I maybe don't understand: just what would it mean for a 
set of tags to be standard?  Is it something to do with player support? 
 Encoder support?  The ability to find info in file-sharing search engines? 
 Does it just give us a warm feeling to be using compatible tags (I'm not 
knocking that, standards are good in many ways)?

Just curious; having a standard would be a Good Thing IMO.

Cheers,
Steve


--
Steve Tregidgo

<p><p>--- >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.