[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[John Morton]

On Sunday 13 January 2002 21:40, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 05:47:44PM +1300, John Morton wrote:
> >On Sunday 13 January 2002 08:12, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> >> I didn't explain clearly enough. BOTH get displayed.  But one gets
> >> displayed more prominently (first in sorting order).  Anyhow, winamp and
> >> xmms let you specify a format string like printf() to tell it exactly
> >> what to display.  Using ENSEMBLE or PERFORMER doesn't lock you into
> >> anything.
> >
> >Why not simply use multiple PERFORMER fields and place whatever is the
> > most important performer first?
>
> For the same reason we don't merge the CONDUCTOR into the PERFORMER tag.
> To "know what he is listening to" a Classical music listener
> generally wants to know whether he is listening to an group, or
> a person.  With the two items in different tags he can program his
> player to treat them differently, while standard default settings can
> treat them the same.  Exactly the same as will happen with the conductor
> tag.

(Stop me if you've heard this one)

Why not simply use multiple PERFORMER fields and place soloists, conductors 
and ensembles in whatever order is most appropriate for the piece?

Probably because you want to make the call as to whether you consider 
soloists, conductors or ensembles the most important performer - but what 
you're really doing there is spliting PERFORMER into distinct fields that you 
can sort/search on. That's a fine thing for a proper metadata stream format, 
but some might argue that it's inappropriate for a 'quick, human readable 
liner notes' comment format. 

You could probably accomplish the same ends by agreeing on an informal 
standard whereby PERFORMER fields have things like 'conductor', 'soloist' and 
'ensemble' appended in brackets where appropriate and write code to parse 
that out. 

John

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