A proposal: Proper tags

WWWWolf · Post by **WWWWolf** » June 20th, 2006, 12:07 pm

I hope this has not been discussed here earlier.

Anyway, quite a while ago, I filed a bug report with a plea to add proper tags to the music files. It was acted upon and while I haven't checked, 1.0 probably had better tags than the previous releases.

Yet, there's two issues with this:
1) The tags weren't exactly as detailed and consistent as I had hoped they would have been.
2) a cursory check on 1.1.5's music shows, uh, the Triumphant Return of Badly-tagged-file.

So here's a squealing, annoying, "sure-except-that-nobody-in-real-world-gives-a-damn" thing, but hopefully rational proposal to the Wesnoth musicians.

Please be forerunners.

I'm a big fan of computer game music. I'm happy to say that Wesnoth soundtrack, especially the new songs in 1.1.x, rate pretty high in my own music ranking, and I've heard a lot of game music.

Yet, with Wesnoth, I see exactly the same problems that plague the game soundtracks everywhere, which is very annoying.

Hop into my boots for a moment, okay? When I rip a bunch of music tracks from a game, any game, what do you think I get? A bunch of badly tagged music, that's what. If I'm lucky, I can figure out who composed the tracks. I still have to give the tracks nonsense titles.

Sometimes I don't need to settle with that. Sometimes, when I rip the music from a game, the game company has helpfully almost tagged the files with correct artist, and given the tracks nonsense titles.

Know what I think when I listen to "Humans 1" from "Warcraft III", composed by "I'll eat my hat if this is not Glenn Stafford's work, it bloody well sounds like his handiwork in WC2"? "Gee, this is a wonderful track. I wish my life was more certain and had some more memorable titles."

So I'm now asking two simple things:

Please provide meaningful track titles for all tracks. By meaningful, I mean titles that aren't technical. "Playing: wesnoth-2.ogg, Title: Loyalists". No. No. Thousand times no. And it's also inaccurate as of 1.1 anyway.

I'm a writer. I know titles of the works are difficult to come up with, and ultimately mean nothing in long run, unless you're Umberto Eco or some other guy with brains submerged in semiotics. But having a title of some sort is better than having no real title at all, don't you think? I personally rather introduce myself with my name rather than my social security number.

Provide full and hopefully accurate information. TITLE, ALBUM, ARTIST, GENRE, DESCRIPTION, COPYRIGHT and optionally COMPOSER.

I'm sorry that I'm a freak with obsession of metadata. Metadata is important, though.

People who use last.fm, formerly audioscrobbler.com, and prefer to have good statistics will soon understand how problematic Wesnoth soundtrack is. It doesn't get counted properly. Tracks with no metadata don't get counted. Tracks with artist "http://zhaymusic.com/" don't get counted, either, it seems. Please use real names or nicknames.

"Big deal, one website doesn't like our metadata!"... Well, if one site doesn't like that, what are the odds the other sites like it either? Imagine going to downloadsomeopencontentmusic.org site and typing "Wesnoth" in the search. You get a bunch of tagged music, half of the game's soundtrack isn't even showing up. Yay.

"Well, can't the users tag it themselves?" Of course they can. But not everyone is as patient as me finding out who composed what. And that leads to confusion. The idea is to reduce the effort of the users on the cost of only very little time from the part of the musicians and game developers.

So please, there has to be some sort of template of tags for the music. You could put additional information about the song to the DESCRIPTION field. The COPYRIGHT tag should at least show the license the file is distributed under (GNU GPL, right?).

Consistent tagging makes it easier for people to find the music and let each other know what music they're listening to. Lack of metadata means that sort of communication has to be in casual level: "You can, you know, install Wesnoth, then see the 'music' folder, and then you can re-tag the music if you want..." while with metadata, the possibilities of finding this music could be endless. "So these people like to listen to this 'wesnoth' thing. I'll just type this thing in my p2p client. Boom. Wesnoth soundtrack. Must be that. 13 files. There we go..."

Yeah, I may have some fog in my head about delusions of metadata grandeur and reliance on last.fm, but it's services like last.fm that may bring more exposure to the project, and that's not happening if the music metadata is overly messy - people are too lazy to change the metadata if it's wrong, and it's not their job.

In conclusion:

I hope this is not too much to ask, and I hope this is not too strongly worded; I'm just one frustrated user with a decade of growing cynicism in the pockets.

All I'm asking is a little bit of rationality.

Post by **zookeeper** » June 20th, 2006, 12:42 pm

I agree! It would be nice to see the tracks properly named and tagged. At least tagged, I'm not sure if they really need real names (and even then it would be nice to have all the gameplay music consistently as gameplayxx.ogg's, not as elf-land.ogg, underground.ogg, wesnoth-1.ogg and similar mess).

It would be safest if one of the music devs did this, but if they could just post down all the relevant tagging info then I'm sure some other dev can make the changes as well. Would be nice to have for 1.2.

scott · Post by **scott** » June 20th, 2006, 2:25 pm

Sound arguments.

TITLE, ALBUM, ARTIST, GENRE, DESCRIPTION, COPYRIGHT and optionally COMPOSER

Ok, let's do it. I have no clue if these are correct. I hope it's not too silly to make up corny names and fill in the rest with false info in the hopes it will get the ball rolling.

gameplay01.ogg
Title: Fall of Elensefar
Album: Battle for Wesnoth
Artist: Aleksi
Genre: Classical
Description: Scenario music for the game The Battle for Wesnoth
Copyright: Aleksi, licensed for use under the GPL
Composer: Aleksi

gameplay02.ogg
Title: Aethenwood
Album: Battle for Wesnoth
Artist: Timothy Pinkham
Genre: Classical
Description: Scenario music for the game The Battle for Wesnoth
Copyright: Timothy Pinkham, licensed for use under the GPL
Composer: Timothy Pinkham

gameplay03.ogg
Title: Asheviere's Gambit
Album: Battle for Wesnoth
Artist: Aleksi
Genre: Classical
Description: Scenario music for the game The Battle for Wesnoth
Copyright: Aleksi, licensed for use under the GPL
Composer: Aleksi

wesnoth-1.ogg
Title: ?
Album: Battle for Wesnoth
Artist: Joseph G. Toscano
Genre: Ambient
Description: Scenario music for the game The Battle for Wesnoth
Copyright: Joseph G. Toscano, licensed for use under the GPL
Composer: Joseph G. Toscano

wesnoth-2.ogg
Title: March on Weldyn
Album: Battle for Wesnoth
Artist: Joseph G. Toscano
Genre: Classical?
Description: Scenario music for the game The Battle for Wesnoth
Copyright: Joseph G. Toscano, licensed for use under the GPL
Composer: Joseph G. Toscano

main_menu.ogg
Title: Arrival of the Heir
Album: Battle for Wesnoth
Artist: Aleksi
Genre: Classical
Description: Scenario music for the game The Battle for Wesnoth
Copyright: Aleksi, licensed for use under the GPL
Composer: Aleksi

main_menu_new.ogg
Title: Heraldry of Wesnoth
Album: Battle for Wesnoth
Artist: Aleksi
Genre: Classical
Description: Scenario music for the game The Battle for Wesnoth
Copyright: Aleksi, licensed for use under the GPL
Composer: Aleksi

Post by **turin** » June 20th, 2006, 2:35 pm

Looks good. I bet we can come up with better names, though. (Although Aethenwood for gameplay02 does seem strangely correct to me.)

Multiplayer Scenarios / Campaigns · Post by **Rhuvaen** » June 20th, 2006, 4:15 pm

Fantastic idea! (And I guess this hasn't come up on FPI)

zookeeper wrote:At least tagged, I'm not sure if they really need real names (and even then it would be nice to have all the gameplay music consistently as gameplayxx.ogg's, not as elf-land.ogg, underground.ogg, wesnoth-1.ogg and similar mess).

Actually, I find the "gameplayX" or "wesnothY" titles annoying. As a scenario designer, I find the numbers harder to remember the different tracks by than a descriptive (or poetic, as in scott's excellent suggestions!) title.

Post by **turin** » November 3rd, 2006, 8:15 pm

If I can get permission from TimothyP and/or Aleksi, I'll do the actual work required for this (it's pretty easy).

Even if they don't think giving the tracks names is a good idea, hopefully they agree that having the tracks properly labeled (with author and album) is a good idea.

So, unless someone objects, I'm going to update gameplay0x.ogg (right now they have no tag information).

Post by **Aleksi** » November 3rd, 2006, 8:56 pm

Yeah, that's a great idea! I usually tag my files. Its strange that the files aren'tÃ¢â‚¬Â¦
By the way, my full name: Aleksi Aubry-Carlson for whoever adds the tags.
He he heÃ¢â‚¬Â¦

Thanks,

Coming soon with the new gameplay music!

Aleksi.

Post by **TimothyP** » November 3rd, 2006, 10:07 pm

Please don't give names to the gameplay music. I would have named them if I wanted them to have names. But they go with nothing specific, so they have no names.

Feel free to tag the tracks properly.

Gameplay 01 and 02 are mine. Aleksi did Gameplay 03.

Recommendations:

Album: The Battle for Wesnoth OST (this is a more official name)
Genre: Game

--Timothy

Post by **turin** » November 3rd, 2006, 11:18 pm

OK. I've committed to SVN new versions of gameplay0x.ogg with no title, like TimothyP asked, but with author (Timothy Pinkham or Aleksi Aubrey-Carlson), album (The Battle for Wesnoth OST), year (2006) and genre (Game).

Post by **TimothyP** » November 3rd, 2006, 11:23 pm

Sweet. Thanks, Turin!

To clarify: it is okay if they have the titles "Gameplay 1" or whatever. That's fine.

--Timothy

Post by **Aleksi** » November 4th, 2006, 8:30 am

turin wrote:(Timothy Pinkham or Aleksi Aubrey-Carlson)

"Aubry"

Post by **turin** » November 4th, 2006, 12:38 pm

Err...

*goes and looks at what he committed*

OK, well, I spelled it right in what I committed - I just misspelled it on the forums. So no harm done.

Steelclad Brian · Post by **Steelclad Brian** » November 20th, 2006, 4:35 pm

A bit of forum necromancy here, but it would be nice if we could give them more descriptive titles than Gameplay03.ogg or whatever. Okay, fine, the original artist did not decide upon a title, but these are soundtrack music for a game - function trumps independant artistic intent. Specifically, it would be very nice if the various soundtrack files could be given descriptive names rather than Gameplay0X.ogg.

We give artwork, sounds, and the like descriptive names, I don't understand why music should be an exception here.

gameplay01.ogg -> gp1_dynamic_orchestral.ogg
gameplay02.ogg -> gp2_harp_orchestral.ogg
gameplay03.ogg -> gp3_battle_orchestral.ogg
elf-land.ogg -> short_elfchorus.ogg
wesnoth-1.ogg -> gp4_strings_voices.ogg
wesnoth-2.ogg -> gp5_martial_percussion.ogg
wesnoth-5.ogg -> gp6_orcish_percussion.ogg

I'd just like to see a tightening of the current random system into a more organized, descriptive system, whatever it ends up being. Right now it's just a bunch of random .ogg's with essentially arbitrary names.

jonathantan86 · Post by **jonathantan86** » November 21st, 2006, 1:29 am

TimothyP wrote:Please don't give names to the gameplay music. I would have named them if I wanted them to have names. But they go with nothing specific, so they have no names.

Scott has already suggested some (IMHO better) names, but the author says he doesn't want names given, so I don't think we should give names.

Steelclad Brian · Post by **Steelclad Brian** » November 22nd, 2006, 6:21 am

If Neorice demanded that his sprites be named "Sprite01-attack.png" "Sprite01-defend.png", "Sprite03-standing.png" would that happen?

There is a difference between "naming" pieces, with whatever artistic perogative you want to attach to that, and naming files so that you can coherently organize and use them.

Having a bunch of music files called stuff like "Gameplay03.ogg" "Gameplay02.ogg" "Wesnoth-1.ogg" is ridiculious.