[vorbis] Vorbis Comment question

[Benjamin Weste Pearre]

> That is a task best left to a database -- and Vorbis is not
> a database format.  You don't want to have your player program
> open and read all your 10000+ music files just to display a
> sorted list of composers of music you have Vorbis streams of.

Everything should be in a database.  The tags _and_ the music, and the
MIDI score, and composers' and performers' biographies, etc.  A
complete list would be a pretty huge database.  But not everyone wants
a huge database on his computer, and in order to get just the database
fields you want, they'll need standard names.

The whole separation of soundstream from tag information is an
artifact of copyright law, and I'm working to change that by releasing
music under the EFF, for download.  My music is not sold on CD.  Why
should I not tag the music?  Why should I put the music in one place
and information about the music in another place?

> Also, in my experience, everyone with a (legal) music collection
> big enough so that browsing through it would take a significant
> amount of time, *knows* exactly what music he has -- no need to
> browse at all.

Is your idea of legal limited by the assumption that you ripped all of
your own music?  My site has music that you can download legally, and
indeed, I thought that sharing copy-restricted recordings with
"friends" (not very well defined) was legal (as long as you hadn't
cracked an encryption scheme to do so).  In other words, if I dump
someone's collection to my hard disk, I may very well not know what I
have.  Besides, legality is for wusses ;)

> >It's trivial to teach a human how to read well-designed computer-
> >readable text,
> 
> Ah great, back to the early 60's.

Huh?

> > and currently impossible to teach a computer how to
> >understand human language.
> 
> Fortunately, no program has any business trying to understand
> what those comments mean, they just have to display and/or edit
> the tags.

If you know what's in your collection, why tag the files at all?  If
you just want to remember some basics, why not store them on file
cards on your desk, since you have some kind of perverse fear of
having your computer find out what kind of music you like?

> 	1) Attributes of the recording /an sich/;
> 	b) in a public database ("The Great Library");
> 1+b is MusicBrainz etc.

MusicBrainz etc are just hacks to allow us to reassociate information
about an audio stream with that audio stream, if it has been cut off
by media that were never designed for computers.

There is a one-to-one mapping between the audio stream and information
about the audio stream.  In the case of all recordings of Bach played
by Glenn Gould, the piece might want biographies and recording lists
associated with those two people to be stored in a database, so that
other audio tracks can be linked to the same information.  But the
audio stream should still have the information in it that "Bach's
biography is relevant to this recording", rather than Bach's biography
containing a list of every known recording to which it applies.  Why
should we have to edit the database every time someone records the
Brandenburgs _again_?

Dissociating the recording from information specific to that recording
is stupid.  A database is useful for computing intersections and
unions of information, not "making peoples' lives easier" by
preventing their computers from being able to help them find a
specific recording.

> Much more than I intended to ever again write about tags, too.

OK, I admit it, I'm enjoying this thread too much ;)

Cheers!
-Ben


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


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