[vorbis] album portion of the tags request

[Craig Dickson]

Jon Shiring wrote:

> Knowing that a track was on 4 albums is far more 
> important to me than knowing only that user X ripped it from some 
> particular album.

Actually, I would like to know what album a track came from, because it
makes a big difference (in terms of audio quality) whether it came from
a disc released in 1985 or one released in 2000; the quality of digital
mastering now is much better. Also, sometimes the version of a song on a
greatest hits package is not quite the same as on the original album; it
may have been edited for radio, for example, though there might be no
indication on the CD packaging that this was the case. And of course,
the version on a live concert album will not be the same as a studio
recording.

In fact, for albums which have been released on CD more than once
(either remastered by the same label, or put out on different labels at
different times, or even just different simultaneous international
releases not made from the same digital master), I'd like to know
exactly which version was used.

The big problem is that most users aren't going to bother putting in all
this detail, which renders this whole issue largely moot. In my
experience, many MP3 users don't put _any_ tags in their files, and
those that do rarely go beyond "artist", "title", and maybe "album" --
if you're lucky, you get "track number" and "year" (often wrong).
"Genre" seems to be chosen largely at random when it's used at all. So
it seems to me like pure delusion to think that most ogg users are going
to correctly fill in any significant percentage of Jonathan's big list
of tags. Of course, Jonathan himself presumably will, but there's no
need for a "standard" if we're just talking about him. Ogg's (or
Vorbis'?) tag format is open-ended for a reason; he can use it any way
he likes without insisting that everyone else do likewise.

Craig

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