[ID3 Dev] ID3 tag and audio file formats

[Scott Wheeler]

On Thursday 02 March 2006 0:13, Aaron VonderHaar wrote:
> Why not consider ID3 a separate container format, which has the
> following structure:
>
>   <id3v2 tag>  <data>
>
> The "data" could perhaps be an ogg vorbis "file" or wav, mod, aac,
> midi-- anything, but the file on disk would contain the tag
> concatenated with the audio data, the same as with tagged mp3 (and
> flac with id3).
>
> Of course for this to work your application would have to be modified
> recognize the tags and to start decoding audio at the data section,
> but this would likely be trivial for any application that already
> supports id3 for mp3 files.
>
> This seems like a good way to go, since it makes id3 a metadata layer
> that's independant of the audio format.

Well, again, technically this could work, but that has about zero chance of 
adoption in the real world.  There's not going to be mass movement away from 
traditional media formats to ID3-ified media formats, especially since that 
would break backwards compatibility with both ID3 and every major media 
format and well, it's not a terribly sound idea to boot.

<rant>

I kind of get that feeling for a lot of what's said on this list -- technical 
feasibility and real world practicality are quite separate.  It's something 
similar to the bikeshed (*) phenomenon.

There are all sorts of things that would be possible -- coming up with new 
container formats, defining an ID3v3 that works with XML streams, move to 
comment value pairs, think of new and exciting ways of mangling relatively 
small bits of information, but until somebody steps up and says:  "I am going 
to start the draft of a new standard.  I have already spoken with Ginormus 
Software, Inc., Media-monopolies-r-us and Frooty-Computers and they will both 
support the new standard and help draft it; is anyone else interested in 
working on the preparation of this document?"  Until that point it's all just 
"What color do we paint the bikeshed?"

</rant>

-Scott

(*) http://www.bikeshed.com/

-- 
Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.

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