[vorbis] An handful of tags !

[John Morton]

On Saturday 23 June 2001 21:20, you wrote:
>  At 00:25 22/06/01 +0300, you wrote:
>  >Ogg Vorbis seems to have a good tagging system. Is there some kind of
>  >length limitations in the text fields? If not, we'll sooner or later
>  >see someone writing complete novels in those, just for the sake of
>  >it. :-)
>
>  Sorry, I don't know why vorbis tags are better than id3... 

Version 1 tags are limited to artist, title, album, year, comment, genre and, 
in v 1.1, track number. The text fields are limited to 30 characters. You 
can't add more field types. They are stored at the end of the file. I don't 
think I need to tell you just how weak this is.

ID3v2 is a monstrosity. It's hideously over-engineered in all the wrong 
places, and it a bastard to implement - hence, whilest it's been around since 
1997, it's taken years for players to support it. 

Vorbis comments are simple key, value pairs. A few standard ones are spelled 
out in the documentation, and you can add your own with impunity. You can use 
the vorbiscomment tool to read and write them, or talk to the appropriate 
library. This makes them already as powerful as id3v2 and easier to use, 
without any pretenses to solving the problems of an exhaustive tag format.

>  For instance,
>  I'm convince a "genre" category _must_ be limited to a certain number of
>  possibilities. This is far better for database searching.
>  Of course, there is the problem of WHO is proficient enough to decide what
>  is a genre and what is not. Surely a distributed decision...

Give it up. You don't have to be a Wittgensteinian to see that this is a 
language game that you will simply loose. It's far easier to just settle for 
a list of keywords and use standard text search techniques.

John

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