by Anamon » Sat Jul 21, 2007 9:33 pm
I'd like to add a wish of my own here: do NOT add support for the playcount tag, or at least make it possible to deactivate it, and have it deactivated by default.
The PCNT field is very disputed, and rightly so: it is not meta information, and therefore shouldn't be part of the tags.
For only one example of what problems this might cause, imagine file organizing or file sharing software. Using the PCNT field would change the file and therefore its hashes and checksums, even if the file has not been changed, only listened to!
If everybody used players that update the PCNT field in the tags, it would be nearly impossible to find such tracks in P2P networks like eMule or Bit Torrent, as everybody would have a different file depending on how often it has been listened to. Backup software might go berzerk because it backs up all the music files that have been listened to since the last backup, not only changed ones. Et cetera, et cetera.
These are the dangers when the separation between file meta data and usage data is ignored!
The 3 additions / improvements that I find the most important / urgent are the above mentioned support for the "total tracks" and "total discs" field, the correction of where album artists are saved, and one thing MCSmarties has actually taken into account but not explicitly stated: the implementation of the "Encoded by" field in addition to the "Encoder" field already supported.
I'd like to add a wish of my own here: do [b]NOT[/b] add support for the playcount tag, or at least make it possible to deactivate it, and have it deactivated by default.
The PCNT field is very disputed, and rightly so: it is not meta information, and therefore shouldn't be part of the tags.
For only one example of what problems this might cause, imagine file organizing or file sharing software. Using the PCNT field would change the file and therefore its hashes and checksums, even if the file has not been changed, only listened to!
If everybody used players that update the PCNT field in the tags, it would be nearly impossible to find such tracks in P2P networks like eMule or Bit Torrent, as everybody would have a different file depending on how often it has been listened to. Backup software might go berzerk because it backs up all the music files that have been listened to since the last backup, not only changed ones. Et cetera, et cetera.
These are the dangers when the separation between file meta data and usage data is ignored!
The 3 additions / improvements that I find the most important / urgent are the above mentioned support for the "total tracks" and "total discs" field, the correction of where album artists are saved, and one thing MCSmarties has actually taken into account but not explicitly stated: the implementation of the "Encoded by" field in addition to the "Encoder" field already supported.