[vorbis] Tag Recommendations Recommendations

[Nathan I. Sharfi]

Some suggestions for the recommendations on
http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tag-recommendations.html:

Add in a table of contents. Please.

Rename the title to "Vorbis-style Comment Field Recommendations" (change
capitalization to taste) to reflect that FLACs and Speex files could be
tagged according to this recommendation. Do note that not just Ogg (or, for
that matter, .ogg) files can use these recommendations; this manages to work
quite well for un-Ogged FLACs and probably APE tags (used for Monkey's Audio
and patent-encumbered codecs like AAC or MPC, or maybe both).

#Ogg/Vorbis#Ogg Vorbis#g

You don't make a particularly good case (if you make one at all) for tagging
files above and beyond whatever CDDB/FreeDB/&c. provides. I get a warm,
fuzzy feeling from having well-tagged FLACs; I doubt I am representative of
the general population. Granted, player/tagger support must be there, but
why should J. Q. User spend his free time adding in PERFORMER data?

Additionally, as someone who encodes Vorbis-style comment-supporting audio
files, I'd probably need to be somewhat aware of these guidelines if I am to
conform to them by any reason other than pure dumb luck.

The following bit puzzled me:

"Therefore, encoders will almost not notice the adoption of these
recommendations, unless they wanted to benefit from its increased
flexibility, in which case they will rejoice."

If your favorite tagging tool is completely free-form (e.g. foobar2000),
then this recommendation provides no more flexibility over what is already
there; it merely provides a suggested structure for tags.  I also fail to
see how a recommended tag set would be cause for rejoicing, but...

The note on character encoding, in my opinion, is misplaced; it should go in
an appendix at the bottom of the document on how to deal with corner cases
that manifest themselves largely in East Asian languages. Further, UTF-8 is
the only allowed encoding as per
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html; calling it the "default
encoding" allows for the possibility of well-meaning (or just lazy)
programmers to allow legacy encodings such as ISO-8859-1 or MacRoman.

/We have the following STANDARD tags/Recommended tags/
This seems to be an artifact of earlier standardization efforts; I suggest
you remove these references and sell a common tag set on its merits, not by
doing the equivalent of yelling.

Oh, consider this a vote for s/ENCODING/ENCODER-SETTINGS/. Much more
verbose, but it leaves little room for guessing in what it might mean. At
least "ENCODING" is a fairly ambiguous term, and worth avoiding.

Consider transposing the two main ideas in the description for VERSION. For
example:
 Some tracks come in different versions, such as "Live", "Fatboy Slim
Remix", "Acoustic", &c.

er, come to think of it...can you pick out an example where someone might
put date or location information in that slot when it would be better placed
in DATE or LOCATION? I'm not convinced that this would be a common point of
deviation.

/ eg/ e.g./g

/Karajan\. choir/Karajan. Choir/

I have a two-disc John Williams CD set that includes, among other things,
"Seven Years in Tibet" with "Yo-Yo Ma, <i>Cello</i>" listed. Do you have
support for your spelling of "Yoyo Ma", perhaps in another CD insert?

In the "Typical example for CLASSICAL [sic] music", you have both PART and
TITLE comments in quotes. Why?

I also suggest that you expand LABELNO to LABELNUMBER so we don't have
LABEL*NO*, but TRACK*NUMBER* and DISC*NUMBER*. Foolish inconsistency is the
hobgoblin of consensus building.

Finally, a style note: you seem to have a predilection for typing in all
caps--this makes you seem like a gadfly much like Jakob Nielsen. I therefore
suggest:
- Don't type in all caps unless you're referring to particular tag names.
- prefer <strong> to all caps if you want to stress a particular word or
phrase. Do use it sparingly, though.

I suppose I could pick some more nits, but it's, um, Friday, for lack of a
better reason to quit now.

Cheers,
        Nathan

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