[vorbis] Tag changes

[Ben Pearre]

> In the interest of flexibility and free will.

???  Why suggest any tag names at all?  Humans are fine reading "This
recording by Giulini, made in 1961, features several soloists, among
whom are ... This is the third aria of act 2, which on the EMI disk
can be found on disk 3..."  Get a computer to work with that, and I'll
give you a shiny nickel.

Any luck getting those oggs I sent you to play in the right order?
Would it help if I added Roman numerals somewhere? ;)

> You have to understand the purpose of the tags.  There are plans a 
> different metadata format, that I imagine will be stricter than the 
> tags.  Tags are meant for human-readable comment-like data.

In other words, tags are an interim solution until a better system
comes along?  It's stupid to require two different mechanisms to
transmit metadata (tags and xml, tags and filename, etc).  I agree
that the metadata format will be better, but I'm guessing that it's
not happening for some time.  Why not make the tag standard as useful
as possible?  If the XML streams are almost ready, forget the whole
tag thing.

Also, standards for the metadata will probably be based on the
standards that already exist (ie tags), and the tags currently provide
almost all the information that they usefully can.  Much easier to
remove tags that nobody uses than to add tags for information that
everyone has thrown out because there wasn't a place for it.

Metadata streams, if timed, could provide lyrics, MIDI commands, etc,
and that's way beyond what tags are capable of.  Allowing software to
play songs in the right order by reading their tags is not.

> You may always suggest different names, but that doesn't mean the names 
> will change.  I speak from experience. ;)

Of course.  Still, I'll do my best to persuade others that I'm right,
or to force them to convince me why I'm wrong by offering a better
solution to my problem.  So far, neither has happened...  although I
think that we're probably the only ones still reading this thread ;)

Cheers!
-Ben


-- 
bwpearre at alumni.princeton.edu                http://hebb.mit.edu/~ben


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