[vorbis] VORBISCOMMENT

[Michael Smith]

At 08:35 AM 1/15/01 +0000, you wrote:
>#if Michael Smith
>> I don't do windows GUI stuff, so it won't be me. However, if someone else
>> writes the GUI, I'm willing to do the backend comment editing code. Please,
>> anyone who wants to do this, contact me.
>
>I can do a UI in Qt, no problem.
>
>A Qt UI will work on Windows and UNIX, but to compile a Windows version,
>a 'professional' license is needed, which is about $1500, and I don't
>have one. I know someone at Trolltech who might be interested in making
>the Windows port himself though, so it's not all bad.

That'd be good (though I don't think anything that requires an expensive license will become a standard (i.e. part of what xiph distributes) tool. So we probably still need a different win32 editor.

>
>Here's a couple of examples of a draft for the UI.
>
>http://www.geoid.clara.net/rik/arch/vorbis_tag_editor_normal.png
>
>And a silly one:
>
>http://www.geoid.clara.net/rik/arch/vorbis_tag_editor.png

Good start. However, vorbis explicitly permits multiple instances of each tag (e.g. multiple artists should be represented by multiple instances of the ARTIST tag. The player plugins don't do this properly yet, because I put in the current tag-handling (in xmms and winamp plugins) as a quick hack. Suppose I should find time to update those... It'd definately be neccesary to support that in a GUI.

>
>If there were functions in libvorbisfile that allowed easy tag
>editing, I could write this app in my coffee break.

libvorbisfile won't ever do this - it's too completely different from what the rest of the library is aimed at. I suppose a seperate libvorbiscommenteditingstuffwithareallylongname would be possible. I think that it'd probably be better just to clean up the code (libvorbis needs a couple of extra functions to do this cleanly) and provide simple, easy to use example code.

>
>What's up with vorbiscomment ? Is there a lot to do to fix it ?

It's disgusting evil code (I wrote it, I can say that ;)
Apart from that, it relies on unix semantics in nasty ways, is slow (making it fast requires a libvorbis addition), and is probably broken right now (it may compile, it's unlikely to run successfully). As a rough example of how to do things, it might serve. As code to use as-is, it's useless. 

>
>The nice API that exists for decoding makes it trivial for me to
>implement playing from HTTP, FTP, or any other IO.
>
>So, big wish: IO-type-independent functions to allow tag editing.

Possible, but overkill. Really, this will be a single 40-50 line function. Pain to write really well, but nobody will ever really need to change it.

Michael

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