[vorbis-dev] Re: [vorbis] Request for Standardization: classical music TAGS

[Jonathan Walther]

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On Wed, 3 Oct 2001 volsung at asu.edu wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> This isn't an either/or discussion.  Vorbis comments are perfectly adequate
> for storing simple information about a stream.  The only debate is over what
> counts as "simple".  For very complex information, it makes sense to store it

I think CONDUCTOR should be in a different tag to "ARTIST".  And groups
operating together need their own designations.  Classical music needs
different tags than pop music.  Hence, ENSEMBLE as well as PERFORMER
tags are needed.

> I don't know which request you referring to here.  The changes that have been
> made seem to be quite reasonable, with the only overloading taking in the
> ARTIST tag, which mirrors the overloading that takes place in common usage.

Putting the conductor, pianist, and orchestra into the ARTIST tag is
just horribly wrong.

> This is a silly comment.  I don't recall the appearance of things in WinAMP
> ever being a driving motivation for this discussion.  The concern here is that

On IRC, "backwards compatibility with dumb ogg players" was the main
issue.  The whole reason people were overloading and shoehorning the POP
music tags for classical was because of this, and winamp was mentioned
as the main culprit because someone said they were "inflexible".

> The Winamp guy who would be responsible for such "sniffing" is on this list.
> :)  But, yes, I agree that parsability should be a concern.  Vorbis comments
> should be easy to parse (or in most cases, not parsed, just used as-is) since

Yes, I am proposing we do things so you can use the tags as is.  Many
other posters, in the interests of "backwards compatibility with stupid
clients" try to shoehorn stuff into a few inappropriate tags.

> they shouldn't be holding tons of junk.  If we deviate from that standard,
> people should thwack us in the head.

People that listen to classical music won't thwack you on the head for
providing what we consider essential information about a track.  Noone
expects the pop music crowd to use all those tags, and all the tags are
optional anyway; if you don't need the tag, don't use it.  How is that
bloat, eh?

> On the other hand, XML is a good choice for the structured data because THE
> PARSING CODE IS ALREADY WRITTEN.  All of the excessive XML hype has ensured
> that there are XML tools on every non-dead platform in existence.  I'm quite
> in favor of leveraging those libraries to solve the metadata problem rather
> than reinventing the wheel.

If that is the case, I stand corrected.  I've been looking for a decent
C library that will take an XML entity and turn it into a link-list of
strings or other associative mechanisms.  Can you refer me to something
like that?  If the parsing code for XML is already written, theres a few
projects I wouldn't mind using it for.

Jonathan

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