[vorbis] Quality & Tags

[Alexander Poquet]

Hey folks.

I know tags aren't anyone's favorite subject, but I'd like to make a suggestion
for a tag that I think is quite important -- a quality tag.

So important, I think, that oggenc really ought to automatically create one
when the -q option is used.  As all of us know, in the Vorbis codec the
quality of the stream is often a more important (and more informative) value
than the stream's nominal bitrate.  Yet the latter is tagged and the former
not -- this is quite a shame.

Sitting around on #vorbis at opn, I notice that we get a lot of people coming
in asking for explanations about what -q n means for any value of n.  They
have no real intuitive concept, I feel, because they haven't knowingly heard
different quality outputs unless they've done some tests themselves.  So
people make graphs against bitrate and try to explain it that way... which is
really largely useless, IMHO.

Every day that goes by, more and more people are coming to Ogg Vorbis and
more and more people are encoding.  With projects like giFT promising a robust
p2p network in the near future, there will be a lot of sharing of ogg files --
in fact, there already is -- and people who haven't yet encoded will benefit
greatly from "Hey, I like how this sounds.  What quality is it?" and being
able to check.

I'm not the only person to ask about this -- some others have on #vorbis --
and I think it would be a real godsend.  Somebody should just make it
official, and add the necessary code to oggenc to have it automated.  I
propose:

QUALITY=<number>

Hope some of you agree.

-- 
Alexander Poquet                | We leave the obvious generalizations to the
atpoquet at ucdavis.edu            | reader.                  -- Israel Herstein
Use of PGP preferable in reply  |               Use Linux!


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