[vorbis] Tag Proposal -> Tag Standard

Erik Stenborg d99papa at dtek.chalmers.se
Thu Apr 25 12:34:41 PDT 2002



First of all I must say that I find it amusing that this subject can cause
so much traffic on this mailing list. I wonder why...? Next I will add
some to this traffic:

In some ways the vorbis style of storing tags is good.
1. International character encoding
2. very flexible size

But there are some items that seems like bad design to me:
1. Tag is located at the beginning of files
2. Multiple files with same name is permitted and even encouraged

1) Having the tag at the beginning makes changing of the tag difficult -
the whole file has to be rewritten. When streaming it is necessary to send
the tag before the actual content, but this is not really a convincing
argument to locate the tag at the beginning also when the file is
statically stored. At least, if the tag is at the beginning padding should
be possible and encouraged (a la id3v2). I think it is possible to pad
vorbis comments, but it is obviously not encouraged (since it is neither
mentioned anywhere nor implemented)

2) I can't see any reason for having multiple fields with the same name.
The example: 
ARTIST=Dizzy Gillespie
ARTIST=Sonny Rollins
ARTIST=Sonny Stitt

is nothing I would be "jotting [as?] a quick note on the bottom of a CDR".
Personally I would write "Performers: Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and
Sonny Stitt" - I would never repeat the word "performer" three times. For
those who dont like "," as separator, there are several other to choose
from in the character set, e.g.: CR, LF, CR+LF, FF, LSep, PSep etc... What
is the purpose of having multiple fields with the same name?

<p>Regards,
Erik

<p>--- >8 ----
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