[vorbis] Vorbis Comment question

[Beni Cherniavsky]

On 2003-03-03, Segher Boessenkool wrote:

> John Morton wrote:
> > On Mon, 03 Mar 2003 03:53, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
>
> A program that sorts streams on tag values is pretty useless --
> TAGS ARE NOT GENERIC METADATA.  Sorry for shouting.
>
Web sites don't contain generic metadata, so Google must be pretty
useless.  Sorry for exagerating your position :-).

> Programs that mangle tag values are retarded.
>
Except when you know what you are doing and want the program's
mangling happens to fit your needs.

> > And I quite like the way that vorbisgain calculates and stored the replaygain
> > values for tracks and albums, and various players can put those numbers to
> > use, automatically.
>
> Info like the replaygain values belong with user preferences in
> a player program, not with the stream.
>
ReplayGain is actually a deterministic function of the stream (at
least the per-album value); storing it in the tags is actually a dirty
hackish way to cache it but it works and creates few problems.

> > Segher Boessenkool wrote:
> > > I actually think all of this tag business has been a mistake --
> > > comments should be truly free-form.
> >
> > I disagree - I like being able to see my pick of the artist, title, track
> > number and album in my media player. I think the tag=value model is just the
> > right level of machine-readable formalization for the task.
>
Let me put it this way: the vorbis tag model is a quick hack to impose
minimal conventions onto the "quick notes".  Creating real generic
metadata and doing it right is awfully hard; 99% percent of the people
would never care to enter the data correctly for such a system.  Yet
most of them want something that helps them extract information from
these notes automatically, even if it only a heuristic that works in
70% of the cases.  If it weren't for these minimal conventions, it
would harly work in 10%, when you mix tags written by different
people.

When you want to store the composers for many tracks in your computer,
the freedom to write "Composer: Bach", "COMPOSER=Bach" or "Composed by
Bach" gives you little benefit; agreeing on one of them hurts little
and gives practical value.

Again, it's just a quick hack, a heuristic, like using grep on English
text files - its imperfect but does the job pretty well, especially
when you only have this text.


-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at tx.technion.ac.il>

pure virtual static warp shield (TNG++, All Good Things O-=)
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