VorbisComment

The goal for this page is to discuss how to improve the Vorbis Comment specification.

Field names

Some proposals for extra field names:

• Ogg Vorbis Comment Field Recommendations
• Proposals for extending Ogg Vorbis comments
• Spotlight importer (not a proposal, but noteworthy implementation)

Dates and time

The goal is to specify a format for describing dates.

Proposals

The date format for any field describing a date must follow the ISO scheme: YYYY-MM-DD or shortned to just YYYY-MM or simply YYYY.

The time format for any field except track duration must be specified with leading T and ending with a time zone. Schemas with and without dates: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+TS THH:MM+TZ

Improving license data

The goal is to provide a method for proclaiming license and copyright information (basically clarifying ‘distribution rights (if any) and ownership’).

The spec. document describes LICENSE and COPYRIGHT fields. But is not clear enough about whether these should be machine-readable.

We should consider working together with Creative Commons to have complementary and interlinked information on the CC and Xiph wikis. Refer to the Ogg page in the CC wiki.

Proposals

One proposal is to replace the COPYRIGHT and LICENCE field names with RIGHTS. RIGHTS must be a human-readable copyright statement. Basic example:

RIGHTS=Copyright © Recording Company Inc. All distribution rights reserved.

But this is not machine-readable. Adding two complementary field names should do the trick: RIGHTS-DATE, describing the date of copyright; and RIGHTS-URI, providing a method for linking to a license. Software agents can assume that multiple songs uses the sameURIs, such as in the case for Creative Commons. Full example:

RIGHTS=Copyright © 2019 Recording Company Inc. All distribution rights reserved.
RIGHTS-DATE: 2019-04
RIGHTS-URI: http://somewhere.com/license.xhtml

Software such as for multimedia management and playback are encouraged to display the RIGHTS statement as a linked phrase using RIGHTS-URI.

RIGHTS-DATE does not need to be displayed as it is required in the human readable version by international copyright agreements. RIGHTS-DATE can be used to determine when a copyrighted work falls under the public domain and related matters.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative recommends the use of ‘rights’ to describe license and copyright matters. The web feed format Atom 1.0 has implemented a rights element in their specification.