[vorbis] Total Tracks Tag?

[Moz]

Oscar wrote:
> What would be the main difference between the tags we've got now and
> a meta-data system, provided they are both stored in the files

The metadata stream would be another thing inside the ogg container,
separate from the vorbis stream. I suspect it would be GZipped XML or
something similar, allowing much more, and more flexibly defined,
information to be included.

The advantage of it is that the data is compressed (tags are not) so
it costs less, it would be interleaved (you'd still get music quickly
when streaming), it would be more comprehensive (cover art, URIs,
multiple languages) and there'd be more of it. You could quite
reasonably extract some or all of it into a database and query that
way more usefully than you can scrounge stuff out of a playlist (like
"show me all the tracks by Romantic German composers except the ones
Karajan conducted").

Disadvantages are complexity, lack of interfaces to existing players
(and difficulty of adding them - I don't know of a player that takes
playlist management plugins), the content wars, and the meta-metadata
(not every track will have all tags, and there will need to be a way
to describe which ones are present - "has bad monochrome bitmap scan
of cassette cover flap" vs "has high quality colour jpeg of complete
LP cover", for instance).

Since there are levels of metadata, this will probably also result in
further demands for players that can cope with multiple tracks in a
single container, both sequentially and interleaved. That way we only
need the album/work metadata once, which becomes important when there
are megabytes of it.

Example: I would prefer to keep the non-English language metadata in a
separate database from the English language metadata for my classical
collection, but not for my modern collection. However I want both in
every ogg file. For classical music, the listening unit or "track" is
a complete work, but for most other music a "track" is any single
segment. By the time we add full album and track details, plus the
score and libretto (all in several languages) to a track it's not
unlikely that short tracks will have more metadata than vorbis data.
That's without considering the need for photos of everyone involved in
making the music, images of the album cover art, and a treatise on the
work in question. Some people will probably find it annoying that a
10MB contains 30 seconds of low bitrate music and a lot of metadata.

Moz


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