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

[Greg Wooledge]

Craig Dickson (crdic at yahoo.com) wrote:

> completely unnecessary. "ARTIST: Itzak Perlman with the Boston Symphony
> Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa" is adequate for the same reason that
> one doesn't tag "Born to Run" as "ARTIST: Bruce Springsteen" and
> "ENSEMBLE: E-Street Band".

I think you misunderstood the proposal.  Either that, or I did.

The ARTIST tag would be overloaded to mean COMPOSER when dealing with
classical music.  The ARTIST would be "Ludwig van Beethoven" or "Johann
Sebastian Bach" or "Bela Bartok" -- not the performer or the conductor.

That way, players that display "$ARTIST - $TITLE" would show "Ludwig van
Beethoven - Symphony no. 9".  This is the natural way to handle classical
music.

But this leaves a gap -- not only in classical music, but in *pop*
music!  If you use ARTIST to mean performer in pop music (which, again,
is the natural designation in that genre), then you have no place for
the songwriters.  The reverse holds for classical music -- if ARTIST
designates the composer of the music, then you need an extra tag for
the performers.

> Pop music has
> soloists, featured players, ensembles, arrangers, composers, conductors,
> record producers, dates of composition, performance, and disc release,
> etc., just like classical music.

Yes, exactly.  The only difference is in the common usage -- identifying
pop music by performer, and classical by composer (as well as generally
including more information with classical).

> It may well be that most pop listeners
> don't care about those things and wouldn't bother using the tags, but as
> you say, they're optional.

I care, and I will use them (though probably not every time).

We need this *now*, not months down the road when some theoretical
"metadata" has been decided upon.

We also need it to be simple to use -- not only for decoding software,
but for *people*.  I sure as hell do not want to type XML gibberish.  I
can handle typing

  PERFORMER=Joe Smith (keyboards)

or

  KEYBOARDS=Joe Smith

but anything like

  <performer><name>Joe Smith</name><instrument>keyboards</instrument></performer>

is just insane -- and that's a relatively simple case.


-- 
Greg Wooledge                  |   "Truth belongs to everybody."
greg at wooledge.org              |    - The Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://wooledge.org/~greg/     |



<HR NOSHADE>
<UL>
<LI>application/pgp-signature attachment: stored
</UL>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: part
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 241 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/vorbis/attachments/20011003/47d9b392/part.obj