[vorbis] Vorbis Comment question

[Benjamin Weste Pearre]

I know that some of the developers share that view.  So sorry, but
asking that no attempt be made to make the tags machine-readable is
simply stupid:

* These files will live on computers.  Computers need something
  parseable.  The paragraph you quoted requests that no attempt be
  made to make the comment fields useful to a machine - in other
  words, the files are on your computer, but you are essentially
  forbidden from writing any program that uses them.  Even if you
  don't share your music, you might be inclined to share a program
  that manages music, but the "intention" of the spec demands that any
  such program have a good natural-language parser, which puts it far
  beyond the cutting edge of machine language research.

* The as yet non-existant metadata stream has been non-existant for a
  very long time, and we need something _now_, or else Vorbis is
  simply not ready for release as anything but a beta.

* Will the metadata stream have piece titles, authors, performers,
  etc?  If so, why dupliclate all of this information?  That's
  inefficient.  If not, then programs are essentially forbidden from
  having any code that can manipulate the music according to any rules
  a human would use - say, sorting your music by composer.

* When the as yet non-existant metadata stream is finally implemented,
  if it will in fact contain "composer", "performer", etc, then any
  already-encoded vorbis files will have to be painstakingly
  hand-edited, because the information that we need to extract has
  been formatted without machine-parseability in mind.

Now, the paragraph you quoted justifies all of the points above.  It
also basically justifies only one comment field: "COMMENT" - a
free-form paragraph listing composers, CD numbers, dates, etc (to a
human, "COMPOSER=Bach" is equivalent to "Written by Bach").  But if
you feel like listening to Bach and want to see what you have, the
latter is about as useful as a stack of file cards - even though we're
on a computer, we're not allowed to take advantage of a computer's
ability to manage information, but need a human to look through each
file and see who the composer is.

HOWEVER, the actual comment field spec is far, far better than that
paragraph would suggest - it has well-defined tags, and the syntax for
unknown tags is likewise specified.  In fact, I think that it's pretty
well done (especially the proposed list at
http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tag-recommendations.html): it leaves the
tags very readable by humans, while making it possible for programs to
manipulate them.  In other words, it's useful.

It's trivial to teach a human how to read well-designed computer-
readable text, and currently impossible to teach a computer how to
understand human language.  If you believe that it might sometime be
useful for a computer to be able to help you search for a recording
you're looking for, then you must accept some level of machine-
readability in the comment fields.

Stop claiming that any argument for machine-readability is Not What We
Believe In!

That's way more than I wanted to say, but it just all seemed to belong
together.  Have fun :)

-Ben

> > And no, I do not believe that
> > tags are equivalent to a quick note on a CDR.
> 
> Ah, but the developers do. This is what they were designed for, and nothing
> more.  From the vorbis comment spec:
> 
>    The comment field is meant to be used much like someone jotting a
>    quick note on the bottom of a CDR. It should be a little information
>    to remember the disc by and explain it to others; a short,
>    to-the-point text note that need not only be a couple words, but isn't
>    going to be more than a short paragraph.
> 
> I think you're wanting to use the comment tags for more than they are
> designed to provide.  Tags are designed for human readability, not for
> machine parsability, and trying to use it for the latter is obviously going
> to get you into trouble. such complexity is probably the province of the as
> yet non-existant metadata stream.


-- 
Ben Pearre                               http://hebb.mit.edu/~ben


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: part
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 190 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/vorbis/attachments/20030301/fdbcc558/part.pgp