[vorbis] Request for Standardization: classical music TAGS

[rillian]

On Tuesday, October 2, 2001, at 12:07 , Jonathan Walther wrote:

> The ALBUM, ARTIST, TITLE, and TRACKNUMBER tags aren't sufficient for
> classical music.  MP3 muffed it, but since Vorbis is so flexible, I'd
> like to propose that ogg123 recognize and display the following
> optional tags, instead of giving an error message that it doesn't
> recognize the tags.

We discussed this quite a bit on irc earlier as well, and reached some 
consensus, at least among the developers.

We agreed that some extra tags were needed. The main problem with 
Jonathan's suggestion is that it's modal and won't "dumb down" 
gracefully to the simpler displays of old players.

Therefore, rather than introducing COMPOSER et al. we decided to just 
refine the overloading of ARTIST to mean 'composer' or 'original author' 
in the case of classical music, while keeping the 'performer' sense for 
pop. That way a player that just does '$artist - $title' will show 
'Beethoven - Symphony No. 5' as is appropriate.

We added a new tag, PERFORMER, to handle the case when the performer 
isn't the ARTIST. The conductor, orchestra, and soloists could all go 
under (repeated) PERFORMER tags. The voice actor for an audio book would 
also go here, while the original author of the book would be the ARTIST.

In the same discussion we decided to add CONTACT for contact info (url, 
email, street address, what  have you) and to standardize on DISCID 
meaning the FREEDB index hash. I was one of the ones arguing for 
scheme-specific has tag names, but consensus seemed to be for this. I 
convinced myself by thinking of it as the 'quid' hash. :)

That left the issue of the title subdivision. I think it's reasonable to 
put everything in the title ('Sinfonia for Strings in B minor "al Santo 
Sepolcro" RV 621') but it also seems reasonable to support additional 
tags since they do no harm. I'd suggest: OPUS, KEY, TEMPO, and MOVEMENT.

OPUS should probably include the catalog prefix if one is available to 
distinguish ('OPUS=67' for Beethoven's 5th, but 'OPUS=RV 608' for 
Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus.)

TEMPO would be things like 'allegro', 'vivace', '140 bpm'.

If there's no further comment, I'll add these to the spec in a 'if you 
want them people are using these' section.

In summary,
  -r

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