Tagging and timing NSF music

Tagging and timing NSF music
by blargg on 2006-02-15 (#9622)

I'm starting this issue fresh; ignore previous discussion. My overall objective is to work with others on building an archive of timed and tagged NSF music. Let's first list whatever goals we have.

Goals
- Duration and title for each track of an NSF
- Time accuracy of at least 1/60 second
- Tagging tools work on any platform
- Easy to tag an NSF with automated timing
- Well-defined file format
- Playlist support

Re: Tagging and timing NSF music
by Knurek on 2006-02-16 (#9646)

blargg wrote:

Goals
- Duration and title for each track of an NSF

Why stop here? What about full xSF/ID666 tag field (separate artist, comment, genre fields for each track)? True, it would be a bit overkill as composer information is rarely know for NES music, but could be useful.
Also the comment field would allow to gather track trivia (like if it's a cover, fun facts from the game development, etc - HVSC STIL equivalent).

Full backward compatibility would be very good. New/updated tunes would be playable everywhere, only older players would miss on the extended features (the HVSC guys did that with PSIDv2NG and RSID format updates).

by NewRisingSun on 2006-02-16 (#9649)

Genre fields... I take it the genre will be ... "game music".

I don't know why a composer field would be overkill, as the regular NSF format already has one.

No trivia or "fun facts" please. A tag is not an encyclopaedia; the field would be empty for most songs anyway, and I really don't want every time I play a track to be told that the game from which the .NSF was made was rated #113 best game of all time in some crappy game magazine poll (cf. Mobygames' trivia section).

by tepples on 2006-02-16 (#9650)

NewRisingSun wrote:
Genre fields... I take it the genre will be ... "game music".

Unless you're doing say Klax by Tengen, in which case the genre stated by the composers is metal. If they had any better sound chip to work with, it would probably sound like Machinae Supremacy.

Quote:
No trivia or "fun facts" please. A tag is not an encyclopaedia

Any trivia can be summed up in a field called game_longdesc, which contains a URL that can point to a Wikipedia article about the game.

by Knurek on 2006-02-16 (#9651)

NewRisingSun wrote:
I don't know why a composer field would be overkill, as the regular NSF format already has one.

I meant - separate for each subsong.