[vorbis] Total Tracks Tag?

[Colin D Bennett]

Segher Boessenkool wrote:

>Btw, the last CD I listened to has track numbers:
>1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9a 9b 9c 9d.
>
>Try to parse that numerically.
>  
>

Easy! I'll convert that to decimal for you: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 154, 
155, 156, 157. Wow, that's a lot of tracks. I guess they use hexidecimal 
so they can keep the track numbers down to 2 digits ("hexits", 
technically). But seriously, I own hundreds of CDs and I've never seen a 
CD that didn't use track numbers starting with 1 with each next track 
being 1 greater than the previous track. I don't believe the Red Book 
spec provides any other way to do it.

>>If you want to stick formatting into the Vorbis comment tags, mixing 
>>presentation with data, then why not just have the artist, album, and 
>>track title tags all one. Just a 'COMMENT' tag. Nope. Programs may 
>>    
>>
>
>That's what I use, actually.
>  
>

All I can say is: Bizarre.

>My player program uses it's own database, so I have actual meta-data
>for use with my player.  Works fine.  Trying to force something even
>slightly like this into the tag system will only create a mess.  And
>anyway, it would be _waaaaaay_ to slow to try to extract the necessary
>data for, say, "sort all of my tracks by title" from the Vorbis streams.
>You really need to keep them in a nice database of some sort.
>  
>
>>Same thing for the track number and track count tags. If you have 
>>limited screen real estate (and who doesn't) then you may choose to 
>>display only the track number, not the track count. That doesn't mean 
>>that you don't want to store the track count, just that it's a different 
>>piece of data.
>>    
>>
>
>It's metadata about an album, not quick scribblings about one track.
>
>It doesn't belong in the tags.
>  
>

Apparently metadata is working well for you. I haven't explored it as an 
option yet because of a couple concerns. Maybe you can help me. What do 
you use to manage your metadata and what player do you use that can read it?

My concern with metadata is that (1) there's no standard so how can 
programs like audio players and CD rippers use the metadata information? 
And (2) having the metadata stored 'physically' seprate (as in, not in 
the same file and probably not even the same directory) means that you 
need way to link both from the Ogg file to the metadata record, and 
vice-versa. Certainly using a file path is not acceptable, I move my 
files around a lot, I might access my music from another machine on the 
network mounting my music under a different directory, and so on. 
Possibly, using a tuple of Artist Name/Track Name to uniquely identify 
the track would work.

-cd

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