First up, I agree with Pat - at least with FLAC there is a chance of doing this right. There is a more-or-less agreed set of tags which covers most of what you'd need, so Slimserver could to be modified to make good use of them without breaking anything else.
John - if you are using FLAC then don't waste your time looking at ID3 tags! Their only relevance to the discussion is that any enhancement requests should at least say something about how they should be used. And just to think for a moment about design objectives: in addition to functional stuff about being able to browse and search etc, there are also: - should stick to established standards whereever possible [therefore inventing new ID3 tags, or new uses for old ones, is not good!] - should avoid creating tagged files which are going to screw up other players [same as first point, really] Having spent some time staring at the ID3 tags and trying to work out how to map them, I'd sort of come to the conclusion that it's just too hard to come up with a definitive use of ID3 in this area. >From the slimserver development point of view, you then have three choices, I think: (1) ignore ID3 tags beyond the basic ones already handled. If slimserver is extended to allow strong browsing and searching of classical music, you need to use Vorbis tags to be able to take full advantage of them. This works well for FLAC and OGG, and would be not too hard to handle for other file formats that allow free-form tag naming (APE?). (2) make some slim-specific assumptions / standards / extensions to ID3 tagging so that there is a clean mapping. This is kind of where some of the earlier discussion is going, and is precisely the sort of thing that has got ID3 into the mess its in today. There's nothing to stop us doing this! (3) Allow user-definable mapping of some (or even all! - probably OTT) of the ID3 tags. So a user individually could decide that, in his collection, TPE2 = PERFORMER. Or whatever. Prepopulated with some reasonable assumptions, this might be the best solution. Only snag would be the potential UI nightmare of trying to handle all the different ID3 variations! Ceejay. -- ceejay ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ceejay's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=148 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=12914 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
