snarlydwarf Wrote: > The Official ID3V2.4 way is to have in the genre, multiple > null-terminated strings. Like: > > TCON: Rock \0 Hardcore \0 Death Metal > > (Where "\0" is a byte with a value of 0 in it. Not two bytes with the > literal '\' and then '0'... but one byte.) > > The catch is: it's a pain in the neck finding software that doesn't > have a cow about nulls there. (Slimserver, being in Perl, is quite > content with nulls smack in the middle of strings -- it's just another > byte, but most C programs like using NUL as end-of-string marker, so I > have no idea how well Winamp or XMMS or whatever would react to shoving > a NUL in the middle of the Genre...) > > The workaround is to use something easier to type and less likely to > get upset about NUL's, like the ; >
Good info, and you're right: a semi-colon is much easier to type. That does presume you're hand-entering all the delimiters. <sigh> The old genre scheme had a list of genres which were referenced by a single byte. Grrrr. If they'd just keep the reference method, but expand the length of the field where the genre codes are kept. Each byte would represent a genre, with some byte value being a place-holder or "not-set" value. Otherwise, I can imagine having a genre tag, with "descriptive" genres, having multiple spelling versions of the exact same genre name, mucking up the works. I'm not interested in inventing new genre types, just sorting things efficiently into categories. Better yet, we could just bit code the genre selections, saving space and simplifying the scheme. We could reserve 150 bytes, which would give us 1050 usable bits (we'd reserve 1 bit from each byte so no byte is 0). That's 1050 genres. The ID3 people map the existing list to the beginning of the list, and additional genres might be added over time into the unused space, which allows for new ideas for categorization. No gargage in the genre tag, and every song can be put into as few as 0 and as many as all of the known genres. > I don't know anything about iTunes. I don't have it and don't see a > need for it. Several reasons I can see for iTunes: 1) It is well supported. 2) Is is free. 3) Slim Devices supports integration with it, to a degree they don't offer with any other similar software. I'm not a big fan of iTunes, but I am a fan of our Squeezebox. A built-in solution is preferable to a cobbled-together one, which, so far, is all the software vendors seem able to provide. And I'd be happy to be shown wrong about it -- learning of something that would make things work as they're supposed to would be fantastic. > I would imagine iTunes will allow you to put ;'s in the Genre tag, and > it may be possible to insert NUL's in the string, or may not be, but I > doubt it knows how to handle either the 'Official' NUL way, or the > 'this is easier and is less likely to confuse programs' ;. My bet is > it will see "Rock ; Hardrock ; Death Metal" as one Very Long Tag Name. That's exactly what will happen. Then when I do a listing of all "Rock" music, the song that I tagged as "Rock ; Hardrock ; Death Metal" doesn't show up. Still no cross-referencing. But I'm not looking to turn iTunes into a genre tag editor, only to make it multi-genre aware. Its tag editing is sub-standard, but then again, they really didn't create it for that task. One task it was made for is playlist creation, and handling of multiple distinct genres in the genre tag would tie it all together. > But, then, I don't use iTunes. So what *do* you use for tag editing and playlist creation, that is SlimServer compatible, low cost, and well supported? -- pfurrie ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pfurrie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2808 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=20235 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
