[vorbis] Request for Standardization: classical music TAGS

[John Morton]

On Wednesday 03 October 2001 11:55, Jonathan Walther wrote:

> The concept of "Album name" is alien to the classical record industry.
> For classical recordings, I would recommend just not using the ALBUM
> tag, unless it really was an album.  Best of Bach/Beethoven etc might
> find the ALBUM tag useful.  The disc containing 3 canatatas by 3
> different composers would suffer from an unbearably long album name
> and insufferable redundancy if you were to conclude that "the names of
> every piece on this disk taken together will form the ALBUM tag"

This is good. It's important when writing these sorts of de facto standards 
to state why you're not using some other tag to do the job, I think.

> I like the ARRANGEMENT tag; lets please keep it.
>
> I think its necessary to distinguish between ordinary solo performers,
> "groups", and conductors.

Fair enough. 

> Also, GENRE shouldn't be so overloaded.  If you want to use GENRE to
> distinguish between classical and pop, fine.  

As GENRE is supposed to be based on the id3 genre field, it's pretty 
overloaded already. I think it should behave more like a list of keywords.

> But don't then go on to
> also use GENRE to specify if the peice is a symphony, concerto, ballad,
> or pop song.  Symphony isn't a "genre" anyway, its a specific type of
> piece of music.

Ok, I concede that point :-) But I think TYPE is far too generic given that 
there's just one big namespace. I suggest CLASSICAL_TYPE, and possibly 
prepending CLASSICAL_ to a few other tags to keep them all in a  psuedo 
namespace, unless you can think of a better name. 

Bear in mind that there's no practical limit on the size of the tag field 
names, and, especially as tagging software improves, very few people will
ever need to type the name of the field in. So by that token, use 
RECORD_LABEL rather than LABEL, and RECORDING_LOCATION rather than LOCATION. 

John

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