I've been looking at some of the tag editors out there, the tagging capabilities supported by oggtags, apetags, ID3v2-4, and code to support them. And I found a list of suggested tags by a "community of Ogg/Vorbis users for their own use."

The list of suggested oggtags was drawn up to meet specific, reasonable, goals. And one of the stated non-goals was stuffing graphics, liner notes and pet names in the file. But it's still pretty extensive, and I just can't see your average user entering alla that stuff. Well, I can't see ME doing it anyway. Personally, I have very modest tagging needs--what's the track's name, who performed it, where I got it from, maybe the genre (knowing who performed it generally tells me that).

So I'm wondering what most folks, and most audiophiles, feel is the minimum required info an audio file should carry around with it.

Track artist (and album artist if not the same as the track artist)
Track name
Release year
Track number
Genre
Encoded by, where I add my nick and the encoder settings

Although I'm not an audiophile... More of a casual listener with a taste for reasonable quality...

Edit: Meant track artist, not album artist...

I don't use tags. The filename and place in directory structure should tell everything there is to know. When I spot a typo in the album name, I simply rename the album directory without modifying my files.

Editing tags means changing the creation date and the md5 checksum.
Renaming files leaves those intact.

This is rather useful when doing backups and comparing your collection with your friends' collections (for "statistical" reasons only).

Think "radio stations"... Each and every one of the tag fields can be useful.

By the way, did you know that WAV files have good "tagging" support?
Here are all the fields:

IARL: Archival Location
IART: Artist
ICMS: Commissioned
ICMT: Comments
ICOP: Copyright
ICRD: Creation date
ICRP: Cropped
IDIM: Dimensions
IDPI: Dots Per Inch
IENG: Engineer
IGNR: Genre
IKEY: Keywords
ILGT: Lightness
IMED: Medium
INAM: Name/Title
IPTL: Palette Setting
IPRD: Product
ISBJ: Subject
ISFT: Software
ISHP: Sharpness
ISRC: Source
ISRF: Source Form
ITCH: Technician
DISP: Sound Scheme Title

By the way.. You can attach videos and images to WAV files, which is dumb to my opinion .. But it is possible, supported by default by wav's, no hacks.

Sachankara:


I am with you. But . . . why the encoder settings? Is that useful enough that it should be common? Is it common enough that it's useful to look for? Am I stupid for expecting you to know the answers to those questions??

Annuka:


Are you getting the album/artist/etc info automatically or inputting it manually? Because I've noticed several CDs, compilations, whose info on CDDB lists the artist incorrectly. One of my favorites, The Chill-Out Album 2, lists Fatboy Slim as the artist for ALL the tracks.

SK1:


True. I read that Ogg Vorbis Coent Field Recommendation list of suggested tags, and I can see a possible use for all of them. Using all of them wouldn't even inflate the file size too much (considering how big your average audio file is).

On the other hand, though, I'm asking this because I'm in the design phase of a project that is targeted strictly toward end users. I'm not thinking radio station, I'm thinking more on the level of ham radio.



No, I did not! This list is an excellent addition to my documentation assembly. Thanks for tossing it out there.

You're welcome .

Well, I do share my music with my friends so they can find out what they like and what they don't... Then they buy what they find good, same goes for me the other way around... I really don't know what I have that information for, but I guess I initially thought of it as a good way to show approximately what quality the music is encoded at... For my friends that is... Using tags and such on wav files makes them unreadable on most software I've tried... I'd recommend you to stay away from messing with the RIFF/wave headers...

"Using tags and such on wav files makes them unreadable on most software I've tried... I'd recommend you to stay away from messing with the RIFF/wave headers..."
That is true with some software, but the problem is with the SOFTWARE, certainly not with the WAVs themselves.

I use:
Artist
Song Title
Track Number
Album Name
Release Year
Genre

Every other field might be useful for someone (maybe the comment field) but I don't need them

I get what I can from CDDB/FreeDB and run everything thorugh a grammar checker (I dislike sentences capitalised incorrectly). And then of course fix the typos when I spot them.

EAC/FreeDB sometimes has a problem with international characters.

Heh, that new avatar is much better Annuka

-Album Name
-Album/Track Artist (depends if it is a compo or not)
-Track Number
-Title Name
-date (usually just the year, unless it is live, then I'd want to put the whole date in there, probably in just the standard ISO yyyymmdd for whatever the format is)
-codec used .Not so much of an issue now, because of 1.0. But I used to like to know which release I was using. Though technically the date of the libVorbis is included on the file, but that wouldn't tell me the RC quickly.
- quality setting. Even though I can deduce the quality from average bitrate (or atleast a fairly accurate guess), I like to know what I encoded the file at. I started out at 4.99, then moved to 5, and now am at 6. Don't really plan on going above 6, I would like to move to FLAC, but my latest FLAC test resulted in REALLY bad ratios (like <25% compression. version 1.0.4, cd was "Vagrant Records - Another Year on the Streets - 2000". It's a compo of Vagrant Records artists, mainly emo/punk/rock stuff).
- EAC usually throws in that Description tag, which I don't ever bother to delete. So that is often in there as well.

This is one of the reasons why I love Vorbis

ARTIST=Track artist
TITLE=Title
ALBUM=Album
TRACKNUMBER=Track number
DATE=Year of the original recording (even if it is a remaster released later)
GENRE=Genre
COMMENT=Secure ripping with EAC (DD.MM.YYYY)

ENCODED BY=Volcano
COMPOSER=Whoever wrote lyrics and/or music
PRODUCER=Album or track producer (if specified on the CD, which is not the case with sampler CDs)
REMASTERING (if the CD is a remaster, I prefer to specify who did it and when it was released, like 'REMASTERING=Bob Ludwig, 1996')

And, of course, the ReplayGain tags.

It takes quite a lot of work, but I want the information (especially with borrowed CDs). WinVorbis is a great help for this, I love it.

CU

Dominic

I have crappy hardware players that pretty much necessitate that I use DOS filenames for my MP3's, though for some reason they have no trouble with ID3v2 tags (neither reads tags at all anyhow). So suffice it to say that tagging is important to me.

I use Title, Artist, Album, TrackNr, Year, Genre and Encoded By, and that's it.

Looks like there's a rough consensus on which tags are used, though there'll always going to be folks that use ISRC and UPNs and the like.