Music tagging

Hello!

For my XSPF plug-in for foobar2000 I needed more meta data than XSPF
supports natively and as I looked in the List of known XSPF metas
<http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_known_XSPF_metas> the metas
were neither appropriate nor sufficient for my situation.
Some research in the web I dicovered this very useful website
<http://age.hobba.nl/audio/tag_frame_reference.html> which deals with
different tagging standards and provides a good basis for comparing
these. So I made hierarchical structure of well known, often used tags
and the ones I found important.

The mindmap (made with FreeMind) can be found here
<http://fooxspf.sourceforge.net/musicTaggingScheme01.mm> and a PNG file
here <http://fooxspf.sourceforge.net/musicTaggingScheme01.png>.

The structure is meant to be used as an URI for example
"http://example.com/meta/audio/0.1/artist/" will identify an artist tag.
But as the artist can be more than only one person or band there are
possibilities to refine the aritst information (i.e. to indicate the
writer or conductor).

Most names can have a sort key wich I called "sort name" (in the URI
written with an underscore "sort_name"). In the matroska tagging spec
it's called "sort with". Some fields have user specified names. The
instrument tag would look like this
"http://example.com/meta/audio/0.1/artist/instrument/guitar" and if
there is more than one player of a certain instrument you can add a
number to the end (i.e ".../artist/intrument/guitar/2/sort_name" for the
sort key of the second guitar player).

The "artist/original" is a somewhat special. underneath it you can use
the same tags as for artist (i.e. ".../artist/original/author")

This tagging scheme is meant for audio (especially music) only, as the
tagging for video is more sophisticated. Also it should be considered as
"work in progress" and as you can see I'm not sure about the tags
indicated by question marks .

Is it possible to make this proposal somewhat official? I think the most
users/implementers of XSPF could use this scheme. Of course I need a
kind of specification and explanation for each tag. I could use some
help with that. In my opinion there should be an extended official meta
"namespace".
I'd like to hear yor opinion to this idear and to the proposed tags.

Clemens


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[Sebastian Pipping-4]

Very cool you come up with this!


M@d Man wrote:
> The instrument tag would look like this
> "http://example.com/meta/audio/0.1/artist/instrument/guitar" and if
> there is more than one player of a certain instrument you can add a
> number to the end (i.e ".../artist/intrument/guitar/2/sort_name" for the
> sort key of the second guitar player).

Can you explain this in more detail please?


> This tagging scheme is meant for audio (especially music) only, as the
> tagging for video is more sophisticated. Also it should be considered as
> "work in progress" and as you can see I'm not sure about the tags
> indicated by question marks .

Take my vote for <legal.label>.


> Is it possible to make this proposal somewhat official? I think the most
> users/implementers of XSPF could use this scheme. Of course I need a
> kind of specification and explanation for each tag. I could use some
> help with that. In my opinion there should be an extended official meta
> "namespace".
> I'd like to hear yor opinion to this idear and to the proposed tags.

I like the idea, I think official XSPF extensions are a good thing.

I have two questions at the moment:

 - For a two-disc album I assume <album.total_tracks> holds
   the sum of the number of tracks on the first and the second disc.
   How do we specify the number of tracks for each disc?

 - Some of these are already handled by XSPF, e.g. <track.title>
   I assume we omit these on meta and that you added them for completeness?



Sebastian

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Hello!
>> The instrument tag would look like this
>> "http://example.com/meta/audio/0.1/artist/instrument/guitar" and if
>> there is more than one player of a certain instrument you can add a
>> number to the end (i.e ".../artist/intrument/guitar/2/sort_name" for the
>> sort key of the second guitar player).
>>    
>
> Can you explain this in more detail please?
>  
My original intention was to introduce a possibility to name the artists
who play the instruments. In classical music there are often soloists or
if we look at popular music we could name every band member. But there
shouldn't be a restrictive list which instruments can be used, so the
instruments ave variable (indicated by the <> brackets). So I thought
about a scheme like ../artist/instrument/guitar.
But as there could be more the one guitarist in a band I couldn't use
the "sort name" unambiguous anymore. If there are for example two
guitarists with the "../artist/instrument/guitar" tag, let's say "John
Lennon" and "George Harrison", and the corrisponding sort names, say
"Lennon, John" and "Harrison, George", wich sort name belongs to which
artist name? My solution was, if there are sort names involved, I have
to number the artists (so ../guitar/1/ for John and ../guitar/2/ for
George).
Same with the role tag. The "../artist/role" tag is proposed for people
involved in the music but didn't made the music themselves (i.e. a
producer tag looks like this "../artist/role/producer").

>
> I like the idea, I think official XSPF extensions are a good thing.
>
> I have two questions at the moment:
>
>  - For a two-disc album I assume <album.total_tracks> holds
>    the sum of the number of tracks on the first and the second disc.
>    How do we specify the number of tracks for each disc?
>  
I didn't think about that, but you are right, there should be an
indication for this. There could be also a "../disc/total_tracks/" tag.
>  - Some of these are already handled by XSPF, e.g. <track.title>
>    I assume we omit these on meta and that you added them for completeness?
>  
Yes and no. For XSPF I would leave them out. But as you said for
completeness they should be in a kind of specification. This proposal
could be also used by rss feeds or other services where you have to
identify meta data (like MusicBrainz, last.fm or similar).

I forgot to mention the ability of this scheme to adress different
levels of complexity for the tags. Namely if you don't want to use the
instrument or composer parts of the artist tag you could identify the
main artist simply by ../artist/ and if you don't know the specific
dates you can use ../date/ instead. This however doesn't work for all
nodes in the hierarchy. Again these tags are already handled by XSPF
natively, but for a complete tag description they are essential.

Clemens


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