[vorbis] Vorbis Comment question

[Sergey Meniailenko]

I understand that you can create custom vorbis comment fields, but let's face the fact that no ogg player out there has adequate support for custom fields as yet -- you cannot, for example, tell xmplay or winamp to display custom field information in the playlist. Including a field name in the official specs will speed up the acceptance of a standard.

Also consider that separating information into fields can be very important. To take this to an extreme, there could be just one official field with the artist, track name, album name, year and other goodies all crammed together, -- but that wouldn't be useful, would it? In my case, I think that using the GUESTARTIST field is helpful. For example, take the following track:

Artists: Kellee (feat. Dave Audé & Stephen Levy)
Title: My Love
Version: d'still'd NRG Remix

I argue that it is better to separate the featured artists from ARTIST into GUESTARTIST. In that case, you will be able to choose whether or not to display the secondary artists -- a feature that could be useful in portable players which have limited screen space. You wouldn't be able to do that if you just put the whole string in the ARTIST field.

To respond to Peter Harris, I think that the format that you are suggesting [(guest) Artist Name] is not useful, because the (guest) would be displayed for each collaborator, which would look awful. If you wanted to rename the above example using an automatic rename utility, you would get something like this:

Kellee «My Love» [d'still'd NRG Remix] (feat. (guest) Dave Audé & (guest) Stephen Levy).ogg

Let's just say that it's kind of ugly. :-/

Sergey

<p>-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vorbis at xiph.org [mailto:owner-vorbis at xiph.org] On Behalf Of gtgbr at gmx.net
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 1:44 PM
To: vorbis at xiph.org
Subject: Re: [vorbis] Vorbis Comment question

Sergey Meniailenko wrote:
> I have seen these specs many times before. The problem is that GUESTARTIST is not one of the official field specifications. =)

Well, seriously, I can't quite grasp the issue you're having. ;P

Compliant players are able to display ANY tag. Winamp 2 with a fairly
recent in_vorbis.dll is one of those (I don't use other players than WA2
on Windows, so I don't know about WA3 and other players). If you check
out the configuration of the Vorbis decoder plugin, you'll notice that
you can define anything in the "display" field. For example, I added a
tag to an .ogg named SUSHI=tasty! and changed the display variable to
%sushi% ... it worked as expected. :)

About the minor/major contributor to a tune ... how about

ARTIST=Major Artist feat. Minor Artist

or

ARTIST=Major Artist and Another Major Artist

I mean, you CAN do really everything with Vorbis tags, and as I said,
compliant players already support that. If yours doesn't, ask the
developer(s) to look into it.

And when it comes to hardware players ... well, you'll face entirely
different problems there, most like a simple lack of room to display
anything besides ARTIST and TITLE. I'm also pretty sure that the current
standard tags are flexible enough to suit your needs - maybe you're not
flexible enough to understand that? :) I don't think another standard
tag is justified ...

<p>Moritz
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