[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Craig Dickson]

Glenn Maynard wrote:

> > No, I think all that stuff doesn't belong in the file at all, and you're
> 
> So now it doesn't belong in the metadata stream, either?  I'd like to
> hear your rationale for that.  People shouldn't have any place for it
> at all?

My mistake; I meant not in the tags. Given that the size is not really
much of an issue after all, I agree with Jonathan that the metadata
would be the place for this.

> You also seem to be suggesting that we shouldn't be using UTF-8, even though,
> according to the documentation, we already are.  Mind clarifying this?

I wasn't assuming that we weren't using UTF-8; the question was whether
you wanted the Chinese title in actual Chinese glyphs or in a
Romanization. I didn't make that clear enough. The advantage of
Romanization is that it is at least minimally readable by most computer
users around the world. (Of course, then you have the question of which
system of Romanization to use; for Chinese, at least, there are
several.)

> > 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.
> 
> Which, as is already established (you are not, in fact, the only one
> participating in this thread),

What a strange parenthetical comment.

> is why that information goes in the detailed metadata stream.

That has now been agreed to by yourself, Jonathan, and me, which is
adequate for the purposes of this discussion but hardly sufficient for
"establishing" anything.

Of course, you started talking about all this stuff as "tags", and only
accepted Jonathan's suggestion that it should be metadata after my reply
to you had been posted, so obviously I could not at that time have been
aware that you were going to accept the idea.

As a metadata issue, this can be deferred until someone comes up with a
real proposal for the format and usage of the metadata (currently,
AFAIK, there is none). If we agree that it's not in the tags, it's not
an issue that needs to be settled today.

> With twenty 40-byte tags and four translations of each, for 12 files, that's
> 38400 bytes.  Add a liberal 200% overhead, and that's 76800 bytes.  With 2*12
> MB of other data, that's .3%--negligible.  And that is, of course, an extreme
> example.

Fair enough. Forget file size, then.

> > 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
> 
> Your whole argument strikes me as one being made without reading the
> rest of the discussion.

If you think I haven't been reading it, then I'd say YOU haven't been
reading it. I've been an active participant in threads on this topic for
months. In contrast, your first message to this mailing list appears to
be dated 17 December 2001, according to my archives, unless you were
posting under another name previously. I don't see anything prior to
that from you this year under the name "Glenn Maynard" (or, for that
matter, anyone with "Glenn" or "Maynard" in their "From:" header).

> > 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.
> 
> Your sarcasm is stretching the limits of reason, here.  Dates should be
> stored in a single, standard format, because that allows them to be
> converted automatically to whatever the user's preference is.

But the date field is, like all tags, just a text string. Unless tag
editors enforce a standard format, you can't expect users to adhere to
one. Neither the Xiph.org tag documentation, nor Jonathan's proposal,
specifies a format for dates. Without that, you can't possibly convert
them automatically.

If, again, you're talking about the metadata, and ignoring the already
defined date tag(s), then again I say let's wait for a concrete proposal
before pursuing the subject. Until then, it's just talk.

Craig

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.