[gst-devel] tags and metadata

[David Schleef]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 07:46:23PM +0100, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> Whatever you call it, if there's no way to differentiate it for the
> purposes of nautilus-media, GNOME people call it a regression.
> 
> By the way, there is nothing artificial about the distinction at all. 
> Metadata are tags describing the music/audio irrespective of the actual
> physical format : title, artist, album ... Streaminfo describes the
> specific format of the audio encoding, irrespective of the actual audio
> content: codec used, bitrate, ... And format describes the specific
> format of the decoded audio.


Right now, I suggest leaving streaminfo and metadata combined into
the same tag, and the application should assume that everything
associated with certain tags (e.g., "codec" or "length") be
considered streaminfo, and everything else be considered metadata.
That quite closely approximates what we actually want, since "length"
in an id3 tag doesn't somehow magically become metadata.

After 0.8, perhaps we should add this information to the tag registry
itself, to indicate the purpose of each tag.

(I'd be interested in knowing any tags that can be both metadata and
streaminfo.  Seems like a bug to me.)



dave...