[vorbis] Total Tracks Tag?

nils nils_barth at post.harvard.edu
Sun Oct 5 17:18:23 PDT 2003



heyas-

I believe there is a need for a standard vorbis comment
field to encode "Total Number of Tracks (on a CD)".

Why we need this --------------------
- Existing Vorbis programs already implement this,
  inconsistently, and hence don't interoperate.
These seems the key reason to me.

- MP3s include this
- Some software (e.g., iTunes) uses this information,
  e.g., to display "Track 4 of 13" or whatever.
- It's easy to support, and easy to automate in ripping
  programs.
- It's a natural addition to the existing tags.

My problem --------------------------
This summer I ripped/encoded some CDs on an iMac with OS X,
and had some difficulties trying to get Ogg Vorbis files.
<lament>why won't Apple support Vorbis?</lament>

Two programs I used were "Ogg Drop", a ripper/encoder
and "Vorbis Rage", a tagger.

Ogg Drop
http://www.nouturn.com/oggdrop/index.html
Vorbis Rage
http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/VorbisRage.html

Unfortunately, these used different fields for "Total # of
Tracks", so I became rather confused -- and regardless, they
didn't talk to each other.

Ogg Drop X used TRACKTOTAL
while Vorbis Rage used TOTALTRACKS

Either is fine and natural, but we need a standard.

For comparison:
ID3v2 uses the TRCK field, where it stores for instance
4/13 (track 4 of total 13)

iTunes.xml (the iTunes database) uses the "Track Count"
field (for "total number of tracks")

RFC -----------------------------------

I propose:
TRACKTOTAL for "Total Number of Tracks on this Disc"
...and also, by analogy
DISCTOTAL for "Total Number of Discs in the Collection"
(to be pro-active ;-)

The other obvious choice would be
TOTALTRACKS and TOTALDISCS;
this has the advantage of being more grammatical, but is not
as immediately recognizeable (in connection with TRACKNUMBER)
as TRACKNUMBER/TRACKTOTAL (vs. TRACKNUMBER/TOTALTRACKS)

Reference ------------------------------

The listed contact info for Ogg Drop and Vorbis Rage is,
respectively:
info at nouturn.com, support at chaoticsoftware.com

and I've emailed these with a description of the problem and
an invitation to join us in discussion; I've not CCed this
email to them as these seem to be general purpose contact
addresses.

This discussion is of course in the context of:
http://xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html
  the official comment recommendations

and
http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tag-recommendations.html
  the unofficial extended recommendations         

A quick search of the vorbis and vorbis-dev archives don't
turn up any discussion of this, hence this email.

So does this:
----------------------------
TRACKTOTAL
   the total number of tracks on the CD
DISCTOTAL
   if part of a multi-disc album, put the total number of discs here
----------------------------
...seem like a reasonable addition to the recommended tags?

best,
  -nils
--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.



More information about the Vorbis mailing list