[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Geoff Shang]

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Jonathan Walther wrote:

> Conductors are performers too.  Yet noone seems to object (strongly) to
> having a separate CONDUCTOR tag.

The conductor is a special case.  You could just as easily argue that
they're an arranger of sorts, but no-one would ever dream of putting them
in the arranger tag.

> The group is usually of more interest than individual performers
> playing with them.  The concensus is that tags are for SIMPLE data which
> should require no parsing at all.  If you want to tell winamp "display
> the ensemble, but not performers", without an ENSEMBLE tag, you can't do
> that.

You're going to hit this problem with any tags that are specified more than
once.  If someone specifies title twice (don't ask me why they would), what
will winamp do?  This is probably undefined as far as the standard is
concerned.

Perhaps it could be stated that, in such cases where only one of a given
tag is desired by the player (as in your winamp example), the first (or
last, or whatever) tag will be considered of most importance and will be
used in preference to any other.

IMHO, adding a tag just so that a player knows what to display is
overkill.

> I've already stated that if you are confused about how to use the
> ENSEMBLE tag its perfectly ok to use the PERFORMER tag for your own use.
> But just as there are those of us that want CONDUCTOR, COMPOSER, and
> ARRANGER tags, there are those of us that want an ENSEMBLE tag.

I have to say that, apart from you, there doesn't seem to be anyone
speaking up in favour of ensemble at this time.

> In the end, we don't NEED any tag.  The music should speak for itself,
> right?  If you can tell me a good reason to get rid of tags like
> CONDUCTOR, COMPOSER, and ARRANGER, then I will admit that ENSEMBLE
> should be dropped as well.

The discussions around the deprecation of artist clearly demonstrated the
need for composer, arranger and conductor tags, and hence, performer.
I've yet to be convinced about the need for ensemble though.  And yes, I've
read every single message on this thread.

Geoff.

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