Why schemas and not code?

[Peter Corlett]

On 30 Jun 2006, at 16:10, David Cantrell wrote:
[...]
> And using "contains" to build playlists will fail the moment you  
> have a
> genre which is a substring but not a superset of another genre.  I  
> can't
> think of any at the moment, but I bet they exist.

"Rock" versus "Gothic Rock", for one.

> Never mind that you might want to search for rock songs played in a
> bluegrass style but not the other way round.

I think I'd do just fine without genre tags at all. I'd prefer a  
proper hierarchical ordering, not just Artist -> Album -> Track,  
which instantly falls apart the moment you throw in Radio 4 recordings.

What *is* the right information to put in for, say, last week's ISIHAC?

Genre. "Comedy" or similar seems OK as it goes, but that lumps it in  
with the likes of Weird Al. On the one hand, you have carefully  
constructed puns, and on the other you have "Just A Minim" (which  
they have fortunately not played for a while.)

Artist. "Radio 4"? "Humphrey Lyttleton et al."? It's what the iPod  
shows you, because apparently the album isn't interesting enough  
information.

Album? "ISIHAC"? The iPod doesn't show this text anyway, and if it's  
too long (i.e. you spell the show's name out in full) it's "I'm Sorry  
I..." which looks identical to the other infrequent ISIHA[something  
else] recordings.

Track. The best I've managed is "S50E5 Llaregrub with Linda Smith  
(2008-02-01)".


One day, it's going to annoy me enough I'm going to rewrite iTunes.