[vorbis] TAG Standard - ENSEMBLE/PERFORMER tags

[Glenn Maynard]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 01:03:23PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> With UTF-8, does a '\0' byte mean anything, or can it still retain its C
> function of marking the end of string?  I'm trying to figure out how to
> upload the data and still be able to know where one string ends off;
> \r\n isn't the way, because those characters are allowed inside tags.

UTF-8 strings work just like regular C strings: control chars (0x00
through 0x1F) are untouched.  Unless you're doing parsing, pretend
they're regular strings.  (That's the point of UTF-8, really, though it
has a bunch of other nice properties.)

I don't know the details of you're using, but you'd be well off to use a
text-based protoocl, even if you have to introduce escaping for \n's.
Ending strings with NULs means a completely binary protocol, and those
are much harder to debug.

> I still plan to do the frontend to freedb for tags; maybe you could
> start a thread with a different subject entitled "metadata" stream,
> and do something similar where you take data from the ogg-db as a
> starting point, and let people fill in metadata?

What I'm trying to do is keep the tags and metadata from competing with
each other.  Having separate databases would do that.

(changing gears)

I think it's worth trying to figure out a good way to translate from
metadata to tags, including things like order-of-importance.  That would
mean editors (later, once metadata is done) wouldn't have to deal with
tags directly at all; the library could do them for backwards
compatibility.

I could envision something like this:

<tag type="title">
        <data lang="en" otag="TITLE:1">Title</data>
        <data lang="sp" type="trans">El Title</data>
</tag>
<tag type="title">
        <data lang="en" otag="TITLE:2">Secondary title</data>
        <data lang="sp" type="trans">El Secondary Title</data>
</tag>

(Again, merely a hypothetical format.)  From this, two "title" tags
could be generated, in order.

Now, there are problems with this; editors still have to make those "otag"s;
it's not clear whether they belong on individual versions of a tag, or on the
tag itself (both have advantages that I won't enumerate since this is all, in
fact, hypothetical); and so on.  I'm just showing one way it could be done.

It's impossible to actually define how this is done before the metadata
stream takes form, of course, but I think it's worth considering as one 
goal of the format.


-- 
Glenn Maynard

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