[ID3 Dev] TCON confusion

[Mitchell S. Honnert]

>I'd suggest simply space delimiting the genres
For what I'm trying to do, I don't think that would work.  To use your 
example, how would you read "Pop Rock Tango"?  As "Pop", "Rock", and 
"Tango"?  But what if you really meant "Pop Rock" and "Tango" or "Pop" and 
"Rock Tango"?  It may not be the strict standard, but because ID3-TagIT uses 
a null-terminated list of Genres to implement multiple Genres, I guess I'll 
use it too.  It seems to be the de facto standard and it does avoid any 
confusion caused by trying to munge multiple values into a single field.

For me, I think multiple genres would allow me to give an additional flag to 
a track that is more like a Genre than anything else, but not exactly a 
Genre.  Specifically, I want to identify instrumental, live, cover, and 
remix tracks.  (The latter two are actually explicitly mentioned in the TCON 
spec i.e. RX for Remix and CR for Cover.)  So, I'd like to be able to tag a 
particular track as being "Rock" and "Instrumental" so that I could find, 
for example, my Jeff Beck and Joe Satriani tracks in one search.

Anyway, thanks all for the feedback.

Mitchell S. Honnert
www.UltraID3Lib.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Sorensen" <tsorensen at gmail.com>
To: <id3v2 at id3.org>
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 9:19 AM
Subject: Re: [ID3 Dev] TCON confusion


On 1/16/06, Pyt <py.thoulon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anybody cares to comment on other implementations (how about the Java libs
> around or id3lib ?).

id3lib is v2.3 only and only allows for a single genre. It always
includes the numeric value for a genre as well (if there is one).
You'd have to hack it pretty severely to support multiple genres.

I believe iTunes always includes the numeric genre if available as
well. You can list multiple genres, but it simply treats them as a
single genre -- if you were to put in "Pop Rock Tango" then it would
not try to split that up into (13)Pop(17)Rock(113)Tango, but simply
put in the above string as the genre and 255 as the ID3V1 genre. It
does substring matches on searches by default, so it still works if
you want to list all of your "Rock" songs.

If you're not going to use the numeric tags (or if there aren't any)
then I'd suggest simply space delimiting the genres. I dislike iTunes
in general, but I think they did the right thing here. After all, if
you're doing multiple genres the ID3V1 tag is already useless, as are
any numeric genre indicators.

Tom Sorensen

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