[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Glenn Maynard]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 03:19:41PM -0800, Craig Dickson wrote:
> Personally, I see no need to put all of the liner notes into the tags. I
> really have no idea why anyone would want to list all the supporting
> musicians (as in your "minor backing vocalist" example). The purpose of
> tags is to allow players to display meaningful identifying information
> about the files they play, and to provide enough information for someone
> to track down the CD from which the track was ripped. Listing all the
> supporting musicians (or the recording engineers, or all the people to
> whom the artist gives special thanks and without whom this glorious work
> of art would never have been possible) does nothing towards those ends,
> and seems to me more like an attempt to make one's Vorbis collection
> double as a searchable trivia database.
> 
...
> 
> Anything beyond this is really just bloat, IMHO. Given all of the above,
> you should be able to visit your local CD store (or online equivalent)
> and buy the recording with high confidence that you are getting the same
> recording (even the same digital mastering) that is encoded in the
> Vorbis file.

Some of us like having everything there is to know about our songs readily
available in the file.  It's nice to have standard names for them, even
for less-used fields, so we're not all making up names on our own just
because most people don't use them.  I have, in fact, wondered "who's
that guy in the background?"  Having the data there in the file would
have been great.  (I ended up Googling for it.)  The nice thing about
tags is that you don't have to use all of them; unless you're
implementing an editor, you don't even need to know of the existance of
all of them.

(I hope you don't think that people who want to put a lot of data in
their tags should use an entirely different tag standard, especially a
third-party one that probably won't be supported by anything.)

That aside, the current tag proposals fail to do even the little you say
is important.  Without embedding the language of each tag, it's impossible
to display some of them (see earlier language thread for details).  Without
having the capability to store multiple versions of any given tag, it's
impossible to write a player whose display includes the native title in one
place, and, for example, an English translation elsewhere.  (I consider
this as important as displaying the title at all.)

Unfortunately, few people seem to be concerned with this.  I'd be willing
to help design the container tag format for this, of course, but nobody
seems to want to change from the currently used tag format, and nobody
seems to know of any plans to implement a better one later.  (Which
would be a big hassle, especially after more tools support the current
one.  We're still pre-1.0; there's still time.)


-- 
Glenn Maynard

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