[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Craig Dickson]

Jonathan Walther wrote:

> If you want to tell winamp "display
> the ensemble, but not performers", without an ENSEMBLE tag, you can't do
> that.

I do not agree that that is a goal. It would require excess complexity
in the players, particularly since such an option makes no sense as a
global preference. It would have to be on almost a file-by-file basis,
because for some files, the ensemble is more important, but for others,
the principal soloist(s), composer, lyricist, author, or conductor might
be more important in the judgment of any randomly-selected listener. So
now, in addition to global or per-genre defaults, the player has to have
a per-file database of tag display preferences. Nobody's going to
implement such a thing; it isn't worth the trouble. Yet without that,
a simple, minimal display of tags will be too inflexible, and won't
consistently show the listener what he wants to see.

With ID3v2, you can get away with a simple global preference for the tag
display, because the tagging scheme is simple and has lots of ambiguity
in the term "artist" (soloist? ensemble? conductor? composer? etc.). You
can reasonably put almost anything into the "artist" field, and change
it easily if you don't like the way someone else tagged it. For most
listeners, the purpose of the "artist" and "title" fields is to get your
MP3 player to show the file as you want to see it in the playlist;
strict accuracy according to some standard definition of the words
"artist" or "title" is beside the point.

In contrast, the Vorbis proposed standard strives for an almost
database-like clarity in the meaning of its tags, which discourages
people from using tags for the convenience of their player's display.
"PERFORMER=Beethoven" is obviously just plain wrong, even if it's the
only way to get your player to display what you want to see. (And if it
_isn't_ "wrong", then this whole semantic game of having different tag
names for different kinds of people is pointless and should be dropped.
There is no point to having all this seeming precision if people are
just going to use the tags nonsensically in order to get their players
to display the tags as they want to see them.)

The proposed standard does a good job of organizing basic data about a
recording for viewing in a fairly large, possibly scrollable window so
that all the data can be displayed. It does a poor job of providing data
that can fit into a minimal display of "most essential" information
(e.g. the "artist - title" displays so common in today's players). I am
not at all sure that these goals are reconcilable. It may be that the
whole of the proposed standard should be changed into a proposal for the
metadata, and the tags redefined much more simply. The idea here is that
the tags would be responsible for providing information optimized for
simple player displays, while the metadata would provide all sorts of
useful information in accordance with Jonathan's and Glenn's goals.

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.