[vorbis] Tag Recommendations: Addressed Concerns That Were Raised

[Ben Pearre]

> > >If, on the other hand, you want to search for a certain file, you should
> > >use some library program.  A database like that restricts the user in
> > 
> > I disagree.  I see no reason standard unix command line tools like grep,
> > in conjunction with the vorbiscomment utility, shouldn't be sufficient
> > to find the Ogg I want by the contents of its comment fields.
> 
> Ah great, let's drop all database technology and go back 30+ years in time.

If you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.

Just because you have things like databases doesn't mean that you must
use them everywhere.  In particular, on-line music is supposed to be
easy to copy.  If your music collection is all in a database, and you
want to send someone a file, you need to copy all database columns for
that record.

Obviously, this is best accomplished by having some standard by which
all of the columns in the database record can be folded into one file
for easy transmission.  The closest thing to a metadata standard that
has emerged is the Proposal!

Now say your database has certain columns, like GENRE and MUSIC_DUDE,
and someone else's database has columns like STYLE and COMPOSR.  You
swap files, and find that each of you has to add two columns to your
database to fit the information that your friend has sent.  Moreover,
you can no longer find his music because you're looking in the wrong
place.  Wonderful.

The fact is that if you want to share your music with anyone, you will
need some standard for telling the person what you're giving her.
Freedom is fine for loners, but any cooperating group of people needs
standards.  Yes, they're voluntary - I could be writing this email in
a language that I created in order to exercise my freedom - but that
makes communication hard.

...or did you mean an _external_ database?  That means that you
suddenly need a full-time Internet connection, or a database running
on your machine, or you are just going to take the database fields and
find some other way to attach them to the file.  It simply makes no
sense to have to access two independent mechanisms (the database and
the vorbis file) just in order to hear something and know what it is.

Cheers!
        -Ben


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


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: part
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 233 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/vorbis/attachments/20020425/298a599c/part.pgp