[vorbis] Total Tracks Tag?

[Segher Boessenkool]

Colin D Bennett wrote:
> 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 

It's not hexadecimal, it's plain text.  On the physical CD, they're
just consecutive tracks, I guess.  But I couldn't care less.

> so they can keep the track numbers down to 2 digits ("hexits", 

The word is nybble.

> 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.

You can have skips, too, iirc.  But that's not the point: the tracks
are named 1-8 and 9a-9d.

> >>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.

I use the tags as tags.  Tags are not very well fit for structured
data (and my music collection isn't structured, anyway), so why should
I try to do that?  If I want info about a stream, I'd much rather get
some nice blurp of text than something that looks like a database.

> 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?

iTunes.  Which has a quite limited metadata format, but it works well
enough for me.  If someone wants to write a killer app for Linux or
whatever, please be my guest, but there's nothing that beats iTunes
for me (so far).

> 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? 

There's the problem.  We really really need to create such a standard,
but _not_ piggybacked on top of the Vorbis tagging.

> 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.

It would be a sub-stream in the Ogg stream that also contains your
Vorbis stream.

A player program needs to keep its own metadata separate from the
streams too, for efficiency reasons, but that's something completely
different.

> Certainly using a file path is not acceptable, I move my 
> files around a lot,

Some OSes can still find-em if you move-em around :-)

> I might access my music from another machine on the 
> network mounting my music under a different directory, and so on. 

So use a shared index.

> Possibly, using a tuple of Artist Name/Track Name to uniquely identify 
> the track would work.

Most filesystems have name restrictions, and certainly don't allow full
UTF8 names.  Besides, artist/track isn't nearly enough to uniquely identify
a stream.

<p>Segher

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