Parsability requirements of PART tag (Was: Re: [vorbis] Vorbis Comment question)

[Benjamin Weste Pearre]

> Why not indicate the order on the track lable? Eg: 01farfel1.ogg;
> 02farfel2.ogg; 03gumball1.ogg;04gumball2.ogg ;05gumball3.ogg etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "track label" -- I assume something
like "(05) Sanctus" in my example?  That's what the PART tag used to
do, but it's awkward and confusing to have two pieces of information
in the same tag: one is a name of a chunk of music, and the other is
where it fits in to the other chunks of the same piece.

It's finally becoming clear to me what Segher and that crowd were on
about.  The comment tags aren't meant to contain information that the
player needs to know.

However, neither Ogg nor most filesystems provide a mechanism to do
what's needed (play a few files in a certain order), and no metadata
is forthcoming, so we must improvise with what we have, even if it's
not quite what the designers had in mind.  Sometimes that's called
innovation...

The correct solution, presumably, would be something along the lines
of an archive file that contains the movements in order.  However,
then you have to jump through hoops to get just a few movements.
Playlists are another solution, but I've never found them particularly
elegant -- among things, renaming a file that they need tends to make
them sad.  I've found that the best solution for my recordings is to
make sure that each file knows where it should sit -- think
"object-oriented" ;)

My attempt to make this as slight an abuse of tags as possible while
remaining useful is to isolate the abuse: make a "special" tag that
tells the player (or the filesystem) what order to play the tracks in,
but don't confound this information with anything else like, say, the
name of the movement.

That's the latest thought, but it's late.  Only morning will tell
whether I was on crack when I wrote this.

G'nite all!
-Ben


-- 
Ben Pearre         http://hebb.mit.edu/~ben        PGP ID: CFDA6CDA
Stop sending insecure email!                   http://www.gnupg.org
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