[vorbis] PROPOSAL: Sub-Tagging

[Kenneth Arnold]

On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 03:20:53PM -0500, Monty wrote:
> First off, all the proposals thus far are well meaning, but most of
> them are missing the mark.

I'll say, aside from lots of meaningless flaming, most participants in
this discussion are doing good work on the sort of system to go into
the XML metadata -- not tags. Referencing Segher, tags should do the
simple job of telling what the song is, and maybe who did it. Trying
to overload this system is just asking for trouble and argument, and
that's what we've gotten.

Instead, how about everybody realize that the current tag system is
doing the job it was designed to do (see above) perfectly well, and
redirect all that metadata energy towards the XML metadata stream,
which IIRC is a 1.0 goal anyway. I am not familiar enough with
existing (non?)-efforts in this regard, so I'll pass on the
responsibility of sharing details of what needs to be done and
how. Suffice it to say, though, that sub-tagging, special tags for all
sorts of different music, machine-readable vs. human-readable data,
and all the other aspects of this discussion are applicable to this
system also, so you're solving the wrong problem the right way.

Wow, vorbis-dev is starting to sound like a committee...

> Aside from whether or not subtagging is a good idea or not (IMHBCO,
> it's not a good idea), it cannot be implemented.  The format is frozen
> at 1.0, and this cannot be done within the 1.0 spec.  Sorry folks,
> we've been in format feature freeze since June, and this idea cannot
> be implemented without breaking decoders that have already been
> guaranteed to work forever.

That's a problem, though -- current decoders will bork at any stream
containing more than just Vorbis audio. This may have been fixed
recently; I've been too busy with other concerns to follow things that
closely, but it will at least make RC1 (the "final decoder") not work
on non-degenerate streams.


-- 
Kenneth Arnold <ken at arnoldnet.net>
- "Know thyself."


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