[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Glenn Maynard]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 12:49:29PM +1300, John Morton wrote:
> I'm pretty sure pyvorbis placed tags into a dictionary of lists, last I 
> looked. 

The existing spec doesn't say one way or the other.  This is as good as
saying they're not: order has to be preserved deliberately, and if
programs aren't actively maintaining it, many of them won't.  (It's very
easy to write software that reads data, and then prints it in reverse order,
for example, and if the programmer doesn't think it matters, he's likely
to not fix it.)

> > Not to mention that not everyone will agree on who's the most important
> > performer...
> 
> Using separate tags for separate roles does give you the luxury of deciding 
> what role is most important yourself, assuming those fields end up being 
> singletons most of the time. 

Obligatory response: that's not one of the goals.

More practically: it's not a big deal to make people reorder tags
themselves (if they didn't create them) to suit their preferences.
Since there are clearly a number of ways to use the tags, this will be
the norm, anyway.

> You could, as I said, accomplish the same result by including the role in 
> brackets after the name of the performer, and write your own plugin for 
> winamp/xmms/whatever to parse that information out and order the display 
> appropriately.

Right.  If attaching the specific type of "performer" to each datum
isn't really a goal, it's OK to say "use whatever means you like" (and
perhaps suggest, possibly in a separate document, a way to do this, like
you mentioned.)  It would require parsing, but that's OK: it's not an
intrinsic part of the tags; nothing is required.

Most of this works for PERFORMER/ENSEMBLE.  I don't think it works for
PERFORMER/CONDUCTOR, though, as I said earlier; that's unintuitive.

Note also that a commandline tag editing interface is tricky to do with
prioritized tags.  The ability to reorder tags becomes more important,
and it's clumsy to say things like, "move the third PERFORMER tag up two
spots".  It's not a big deal to design a GUI to do this, though it's
a lot more work.


-- 
Glenn Maynard

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