[vorbis] Total Tracks Tag?

[Tom Felker]

On Monday 06 October 2003 12:39 pm, Beni Cherniavsky wrote:

> That would indicate that these apps are broken.  Conventions are
> useful but programs should be ready to see absolutely anything in the
> track fields, and any program that can't show arbitrary comments is
> sub-useful.

My view may be sacreligious, but I don't see the harm in a little parsing.  It 
makes more things possible.  The issue is that different people want 
different things, so we should be as flexible as possible.

Specifically, some people want the track number to show up in the "title" as 
"02", some want "2", some want "2 of 17", and some want "2/7".  Some players 
might want this to be a separate column, and most are going to want to be 
able to sort them.

The only way for players to accommodate all of the above is to parse the track 
number and total number of tracks.  This is the sacreligious part:  I think 
those fields should be parsable.  We should present the data and let the 
players interpret it however they want (separating content from presentation, 
and so on).  From the perspective of someone writing a player, the easiest 
way is to have two fields.

Another way of looking at it is that while a comment or an artist name is a 
string, a track number is a number.

BTW, though I couldn't care less, I suggest "trackcount" instead of 
"tracktotal" for the new field.


-- 
Tom Felker, <tcfelker at mtco.com>
<http://vlevel.sourceforge.net> - Stop fiddling with the volume knob.

The whole point of communication is sharing information.

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