Music Tagging: 'Titles'
I originally brought up my tagging system late last year, and then failed to follow-up on what I had to say. I (briefly) caught up on tagging music itself1, so it felt like a good time to catch up on this, started with what is possibly my most hated tag
The title tag has to be one of the most misused tags, because people use it for just about everything. Sometimes more than the stuff listed on the track list on the back of the album, which itself is often more than just the title. To illustrate this point, I worked out which tags in my tagging system are designed to hold a value normally attached to the title, and looked at how often they turns up. Now, I'll be fair and say I originally rendered this image with the title tags for comparison for comparison - it took me a little while to notice the read of the tags in the bottom half of the e. But, I feel my point still stands!
A title is the name of a piece, not the trappings of information that are so often associated with it.
From the perspective of organising data, in fact, the title should identify the composition(s) that form the recording. The project of designing a normalised system for describing tagging data is something that I started, and then shelved, finding it to be an amazingly complex project. One of the things that I quickly realised is that the ambiguity of names is something that will always be a problem in this.
- 1 ↑ In other news, a wardrobe shelf is now sagging under the weight of CDs