[vorbis] tags in comment field - why?

[Monty]

> Is there any reason not to specify a good tag format, which can later
> be put in a real metadata stream?

Yes.  This argument accounts for around half the mail in the archives
for the past three years.  It seems to be something everyone can argue
about and no one agree on; in short, vorbis has gone from 'first line
of code' to [soon now] '1.0' before people have even agreed on
metadata.

If you'd like to delay release of the codec another decade, I'm sure
we could come up with a tag format 50% of us agree upon.

However, the *real* reason is that the comments are for people, not
machines.  They're not a strict DTD, they're not machine readable
fields, they're not a turing-complete programming language.  They're a
strip of scotch tape on top of a CD for someone to scrawl one, maybe
two, lines of text onto.

> Let's be careful about what we're talking about.  There are lots of
> kinds of metadata (tags, lyrics, a picture of the artist's dog.) I'm not
> suggesting we need arbitrary, inline metadata now; just good tagging.

This, at least, has already been decided upon for years and it's a bit
late to start digging the foundations back out.  Comments + a first
class 'kitchen sink' metadata stream type.

> The hardest part of a good tagging system is defining the tags ("title",
> "track"), and we have to do that anyway. (I've seen the discussions about
> this; I'm not suggesting any changes to these, here.)

No, this is entirely up to the user, not us implementors, because if
we mandate something the users don't like... they'll do what they want
anyway.

The code is meant to serve, not enslave.  That's why things are
informal and flexible.

> > One route I've been pointing out for the past year is to just import the 
> > MusicBrainz format. I think it needs some work from the design point of 
> > view, but there's a ready implementation of the parser and an 
> > established database to query.
> 
> Looking quickly at the page (http://www.musicbrainz.org/MM/mm2.html),
> it's XML.  Almost all of it looks like tag descriptions.

...for the metadata stream, not comments.  

Monty

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