[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Craig Dickson]

Glenn Maynard wrote:

> 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.)

Let's think about this... you had a file for which you wanted some
additional information. Presumably because you don't own the CD that it
came from; you got the file off the net? So you're dependent on how much
information someone else, quite likely not someone known to you
personally, chose to enter into the tags, and you hope they not only put
all the information in, but got it all right. My guess is that next to
nobody is actually going to enter all this stuff (experience shows that
many people don't even bother with artist or track title, and those that
do rarely do much more), and of those that do, a fair number will be the
sort of obsessives that try to guess when the available documentation is
lacking. (Guitar sounds like Clapton, but there's no credit. I bet it's
Clapton. I'll put it in the tags as Clapton. Without noting that I'm
guessing, because I don't want people thinking that my information isn't
reliable. Oh, and on this other CD, it gives musician credits for the
album as a whole, but not for each track. I'll have to guess who played
on which tracks, since obviously there aren't four drummers on every
song.)

> 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.

Given the proposed format, you don't even need to know about all of them
if you're writing an editor. You can implement it in a generalized
fashion where the user enters both the tag name and the value. Of
course, you'll want to implement specific support for standardized tags
to encourage their consistent use.

> (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.)

No, I think all that stuff doesn't belong in the file at all, and you're
about to give me yet another good reason to believe as I do...

> 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.)

So, now you not only want all the information in the tags, but you also
want it multiple languages? If it's a Chinese folk song, you want two
copies of the title, one in Chinese (perhaps even in UTF-8 CJK codes?)
and the other in English translation?

How many of the people who rip CDs for fun are going to have both the
expertise to do this right, and the inclination to bother? Almost none,
I would guess, and I feel certain enough about that that I consider it
absurd to want to redesign the tag scheme to support this feature. Its
price/performance ratio, in practice, would be awful.

Also, how big are the files going to be with all these duplicated tags?
With RC3 at the default quality level, a 2:00 track (a slow performance
of the Minute Waltz, perhaps) can be less than 2 MB. You start piling on
all these tags in multiple languages and the file will be getting a lot
bigger. And of course, since each Vorbis file has its own tags, if you
rip an entire 12-song CD, you'll be wanting to duplicate quite a lot of
information into each of those 12 files.

Your whole argument strikes me as a masterful reductio ad absurdum of
this whole idea that tags should contain all sorts of information that
is not necessary to identify the recording and which is easily available
elsewhere (the CD booklet, most obviously, but also web sites such as
All Music Guide and fan sites). You think we should not only have all
sorts of inessential trivia encoded in the tags, but that at least some
of the tags should be present in multiple languages! You mention the
title specifically, other things will vary from culture to culture also;
a performer credit such as "Artur Rubinstein (piano)" really ought to be
"Artur Rubinstein (klavier)" in German (or is "klavier" harpsichord? I
don't recall, so of course I can't be expected to get this right if I
ever want to put it in a tag). Not to mention date formats; I am often
at least momentarily confused on the Web when I see dates like "6 12
2001" and don't know whether 12 June or 6 December is intended. So
logically, we'll need not only a language code for each tag, but also a
national code; otherwise British and American dates will get confused,
to say nothing of the meaning of a song title like "Bumming a Fag",
which would be perfectly innocent in the UK, but seriously risque in the
USA without a helpful translation such as "Borrowing a Cigarette".

Craig

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