Talk:Field names

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Picard

Hi, you should also consider the tag mapping used by Picard (the Musicbrainz tagger), although Picard isnt as popular as some taggers files tagged with this tagger are tagged comprehensively due to the data-richness of the Musicbrainz database.[1]

In particular note Picard already uses:

COMPOSER
TRACKTOTAL
DISCNUMBER
DISCTOTAL

but uses:

ENCODEDBY not ENCODED-BY
BARCODE   not PRODUCTNUMBER

Ijabz 9 November 2009

I am currently working on enhancing Picard support for Vorbis tags, and plan to switch to use PRODUCTNUMBER and ENCODED-BY whilst providing backwards compatibility for files already tagged with ENCODEDBY, BARCODE, EAN/UPN etc.
Sophist 9 November 2009

Suggestion

Hi, I am a free software supporter and a FLAC lover who wants to help improve Vorbis Comments. These are my proposed metadata tags:

  • DATEOFCOMPOSITION or something similar, because DATE is specifically for the date the track was recorded, and isn't enough. I think it would be very meaningful if you could sort your music according to the time it was composed.
  • Something like COMPOSITIONALFORM, or COMPOSITIONALGENRE or MUSICALFORM, or at least FORM; I mean, a tag for storing information about the kind of composition. For instance: sonata, song, prelude, waltz (given that your digital audio file is a musical piece). GENRE is not enough and is not the same, 'cause you can have many forms from different genres (rock ballad, pop ballad, whatever ballad), or different composition prototypes sharing a common genre (baroque opera, baroque prelude, baroque concert, and so).

The next ones are far more common in the real world (because of ID3 I guess) and exist to alleviate the ambiguous and limited nature of the ARTIST tag. As you've written in the Ogg Vorbis format specification page (source): "In popular music this is usually the performing band or singer. For classical music it would be the composer. For an audio book it would be the author of the original text." But what if all these types of artist are different people and are required for a single work? Adding as many ARTIST fields as you may need is not a good solution. Imagine this:

TITLE=A Taste of Honey, ARTIST=Bobby Scott (the composer), ARTIST=Ric Marlow(the lyricist), ARTIST=George Martin (the arranger), ARTIST=The Beatles(as performers), MADNESS!!!

That's a true case on a cover by The Beatles, and there'are plenty like that one. ARTIST does suck and should not exist at all. We all would love the following tags instead:

  • COMPOSER for the person(s) who made/composed the music.
  • LYRICIST obviously for the person(s) who wrote the song lyrics. Perhaps WRITER would be a better option, so all the literature artists are considered, i.e. lyricists, poet, audiobook author, playwright, etc.
  • PERFORMER I know Vorbis Comments already have this one, but it is worthy mention its importance ;-)
  • ARRANGER can do other important artistic roles for a music record/performance, such as adapting a composition or instruments. Not to be confused with composers or performers.
  • CONDUCTOR. The conductor leads the performance, but is not a performer.
  • Maybe one for AUDIOENGINEER or PRODUCER.

And those are the tags I use along TRACKNUMBER, TITLE, DATE, ALBUM, GENRE, COPYRIGHT and LICENSE to keep organized my audio library. Thanks for making such amazing audio and video codecs, and I'm thankful that my suggestion will be taken into account because of the open nature of this project. Regards! --IsacDaavid 18:53, 10 August 2012 (PDT)