Year By Track

[BrodyBoy]

Re: Year By Track

Perhaps the standards people should set one tag as "recording year" and another as "release year".

And therein lies the rub....

Whether we're talking about metadata provided by publishers, library management tools designed by software engineers, or the collective preferences of end users, there aren't really any "standards people." It's kind of the "original sin" of digital music, and it's probably the reason for about 80% of the discussion on forums like this one. :(

[schmidj]

Re: Year By Track

Having worked for many, many years on various standards committees, or groups filing comments or making suggestions to standards committees, the nonprofits, such as those below, often have organized procedures for suggestion or proposal of changes. If the standard is actually adopted by one of the world standards organizations as a true standard, they are required to have such a system or they are at risk of antitrust prosecution. Most standard setting organizations are very happy to have new blood to work on improving their standards.

Proprietary standards, such as those dreamed up by Microsoft, Apple, Sony or such, that's a different story. Good luck, unless you are a large corporation like my former employer (I'm retired now), and can use your purchasing power to influence their direction (money talks!) That's why there are the FLACs of the world, to do better without the influence of large corporate business models. And many of these large corporations, including my former employer, do strongly support the nonprofit open standards efforts, because most things in the world work better when standards are available to foster interoperation between devices.

The ID3 tags are standardized by id3.org. They have a list of contributors and links to contact them on their webpage.

For FLAC, the standard is set by xiph.org. Not sure how they handle feature requests, but they do have a bug report link.

MusicBrainz is also a nonprofit, and is run by metabrainz.org. They do have a contact page, so might be open to suggestions. While their software, Picard, works well, the database interface to dBPoweramp has an issue and keeps hanging.

Freedb is a lost cause, if you want any level of detail. They have quantity, not quality. Look at their raw database entries on the web. Very little info, not even composers.

I will agree that many of the commercial software products and databases are sorely lacking either in performance or user friendliness. For the most part, dBPoweramp is an outstanding exception.

The issue of software interfaces and performance extends very much to the audio and music editing software business as well. Some software performs well musically with good audio quality but has a miserable user interface, other has a nice user interface but doesn't do what you need audio or music wise. In the days of analog audio hardware, the successful products sounded good, worked well, and had simple controls that any audio engineer or musician could figure out without an instruction manual. Sadly, that has become lost.

[PepsiCan]

Re: Year By Track

The ID3 tags are standardized by id3.org. They have a list of contributors and links to contact them on their webpage.

For FLAC, the standard is set by xiph.org. Not sure how they handle feature requests, but they do have a bug report link.

ID3v2 supports multiple year tags. It has one (YEAR) for the issue date of the record and ORIGYEAR for the original release year of a track. FLAC has no metadata standard. You can pretty much define your tags as you like them and add additional ones as much as you want.

The issue is therefore not the music, but the application. I think what needs to happen is for additional meta fields to be added to the "Review Metadata" screen.