As id3.org seems to be down currently, I try it here in this community. Maybe someone knows how this is done properly. So, is there an established way to tag live recordings? Or, more general, is there a field in ID3v2Tags (also for APEv2, VORBIS and other types of metadata) for something like a "Recording Type", which could have options like "studio recording", "live", "instrumental", "unplugged" and maybe some more?
Sure, you can add "live" to the song title or the album name. But is there a way to actually tag a file as "live"?
Reason for this: I want to add a little feature to my mp3-player, which should skip crossfading (enabled by default, imho a nice feature for most cases) for such recordings. Especially when there is some talk between songs (i.e. at the end of a song and/or at the beginning of the next one), crossfading is quite annoying, imho. Therefore, I want to give the user the option to disable this for live songs. For this, I have to identify "live songs" - and I don't want to do an audio analysis searching for applause.
Also, I don't want to rely on "live" in the title or album information (but of course, this would be a sub-sub-setting for this feature). If there is no "official" way to tag live recordings, I'll have to use a "private" ID3v2 Frame for mp3files, and something similar in VORBIS and APEv2, but I would prefer a solution that could work with other software as well.
There isn’t a standard field that I can think of for this. But since you are asking so you can use this on a separate mp3 player, I highly doubt it would support anything more than the typical fields like Artists, Album, Title, etc.
I recommend you consider a common method for identifying these tracks in your library, and append this to the end of the Title, or maybe in a Comment. Something like [Live] or {Live} to use bracketing characters unlike the usual round brackets (). If your device player software supports “Smart” playlists, you can use these exact terms to filter these terms.
Ok, thank you so far for the replies. I was somewhat expecting this answer - but I'm not giving up hope quite yet. Maybe someone has seen something like that in [enter some software product here].
To be clear: When I talk about "my mp3-player", I mean the piece of software that I am coding since 2006. So it supports whatever fields I want it to support . But my goal is always to be compatible as possible - for example to standard taggers like mp3tag. I'm not a fan of cluttering up mp3 files with lots of private (or non-standard) frames and try to avoid this.
Did you have a look at the mappings?
If you don't find a field there, then you are pretty much out of choices in respect to standard fields and you have to resort to user-defined fields.
So you are free to choose to make your own compatibility. Sounds like a great solution!
This goes back to the original replies. You can look at the existing field options to decide if any of those work to support this in your specific use case, and apply that to your own library. Since the player and your library are both yours from a personal perspective, that would be the ideal solution. But if you are looking for something more general for others, that will be a bigger challenge to solve given there isn’t a tag or flag for this today.
Yes, I did. However, by my experience in this field so far, there are several "non standard" methods used by one or another more or less popular taggers or players, and not all of those are well documented. And some fields may be used for other purposes than the originally intended one. Not to begin with differences between classic and pop music when it comes to the meaning of fields like artist or composer ...
I just find it somewhat surprising that such a field does not exist - especially the ID3v2 fields are so extensive. But it seems that I have to accept this and should find my own reasonable non-standard solution for this.
Not really a deal breaker I would think. As long as you use them as intended when dealing with either kind of music.
Again, with all libraries being highly personal, it is really up to you with how you manage what each tag field does. And if you do this consistently you can easily manage your library regardless of the tags, flags, and even those pesky user defined fields.
To close this question: I already use a "private frame" for an arbitrary set of tags without a specified meaning. These tags are used by the player to organize the library in a "tag cloud". These tags can be additional tags like "singer songwriter", "female vocalists", "my wedding", a list of alternative genres or crazy stuff like "songs die so gut sind das ich meiner oma ihr klein haeuschen zwar nicht verkaufen aber zumindest dafuer beleihen wuerde" (the last one was actually retrieved via the lastfm API for some of my songs ).
I use this list for this purpose here now as well. If one of those tags is "live", it is a live recording.
. But my goal is always to be compatible as possible - for example to standard taggers like mp3tag. I'm not a fan of cluttering up mp3 files with lots of private (or non-standard) frames and try to avoid this.
).