[vorbis] Total Tracks Tag?

[Beni Cherniavsky]

Tom Felker wrote on 2003-10-06:

> 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.

Neither do I, as long as it's not required.  I do see that parsing
tends to be coupled with confusion/choking on any comments that the
given software doesn't happen to parse.

> 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.
>
Just as validly, many people would like to sort on any other column.
A good player should have a generic facility for sorting on tags,
being able to cope with "2/7" by something like `version sort`__.
Such a mechnaism would be way more useful than any specific parsing
for a certain form of TRACKNUMBER.

__ http://docsrv.caldera.com:8457/cgi-bin/
   info2html?(libc)String%2FArray%2520Comparison

> The only way for players to accommodate all of the above is to parse the track
> number and total number of tracks.

If you want a player so sophisticated that it can transform a track
number from "2" into "02" or otherwise format it, it would also make
sense to provide a way to generic way to parse.  E.g. one would be
able to tell it that if TRACKNUMBER parses as "%d/%d", it should be
displayed as "%02d of %02d" or something like that.

Again, I just don't think that a hardcoded parsing solution is a good
idea when a generic mechanisms could do better.

> 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.
>
Perhaps.

> Another way of looking at it is that while a comment or an artist name is a
> string, a track number is a number.
>
What about a Vorbis file that contains several tracks together?  One
could then define something like ``STARTTRACKNUMBER=3`` and
``ENDTRACKNUMBER=7``.  Wouldn't ``TRACKNUMBER=3-7`` be better?  And
how about ``TRACKNUMBER=5 or 6 (don't remember)``?  IMHO it's more
natural to stuck all information about the track number into
TRACKNUMBER and all information about the disk into DISKNUMBER.

> BTW, though I couldn't care less, I suggest "trackcount" instead of
> "tracktotal" for the new field.
>
Both are unobvious IMHO.  Since I currently don't enter either ;),
I'll this matter of taste to others...


-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at users.sf.net>

WEP was broken on every concievable level, and on several
inconcievable levels.  -- Shachar Shemesh in linux-il
--- >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.