[vorbis] Time for Vorbis File 1.1? (was Vorbis Comment question)

[Carsten Haese]

On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 16:20, David K. Gasaway wrote:
> Carsten Haese wrote:
> 
>  > In this sense, tags (or Vorbis comments) already provide a
> > _subset_ of metadata. On the other hand, there are kinds of metadata
> > that are not vorbis comments 
> 
> So, you agree that tags are metadata.  I don't argue that tags can or 
> should store any and all kinds of metadata.  IMO, from experience, they 
> work well for storing many types of textual metadata.  I haven't felt 
> the need for more, anyway.

When you're done putting words in my mouth, let's get back to what I
actually said. Vorbis comments allow the storage of *some* metadata. The
problem is that there is no (sufficient) formalism for Vorbis comments
that would allow people to store a complete "meta-database" of
everything that can be said about a piece of music.

I'm getting the impression that there is this grand vision of a metadata
format that will magically allow:
1) completeness, i.e. everything that is known about the piece of music
can be expressed in the format
2) precision, i.e. two people adding metadata to the same piece of music
would come up with the exact same sets of metadata

Apart from the fact that these goals are ridiculously difficult to
attain (especially #2), they are impossible to attain using vorbis
comments. You need a great deal of formalism to build such a database, 
and vorbis comments are essentially freeform fields, devoid of the
necessary formalism. Grafting a formalism on to vorbis comments would
completely alter their purpose, which is why this is never going to
happen.

And even if we somehow get this magical metadata format, here comes the
next problem: Some information for a piece of music is per track, while
other information is per album. If you attach the metadata to each
track, you'll be duplicating all the per-album information across each
track from the same album. Worse still, there's per-artist information
that would be duplicated on each track from (or involving) that artist.
Storing all information per track would only give you a terrible
de-normalized database that wastes a lot of space, and, if one track
gets updated album information while another doesn't, you have yourself
a nice inconsistent mess.

The only solution is to store only per-track information on each track,
and then store per-album, per-artist etc. information in separate
places. But who is honestly going to do that?!?

Vorbis comments don't allow storing a precise database of music
metadata, but they do serve a practical purpose. I would venture a guess
that this purpose is enough for most people.

I, for one, am now going to stop beating this poor dead horse.

Best regards,

Carsten Haese.

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