Well, there's this... to start with.

But hey, I could be wrong too. So don't read this as the beginning of a pissing contest or anything.

1. All of my tags end up on the empeg properly, so it least works that well.

2. Given who and where tag related software gets developed, I'm not sure that a standard would actually be useful. Everybody is doing their own thing anyway.

3. The more esoteric a tag is the smaller the group of people who would use it are, and the less likely that some mainstream developer is going to support it anyway.

4. Anyone can tag files improperly, even with the basic tags like artist and title, so there's no enforcement of the content of a basic tag anyway, so how can there be enforcement of adcanced tags? If the tagname is "BeatsPerMinute" you have to blame the person who put wrote the tag not the standard if it's not correct.

5. Ogg tags do need to be UTF-8 text strings rather than BLOBs, but the spec says "arbitrary metadata belongs in a separate logical bitstream (usually an XML stream type) that provides greater structure and machine parseability."

6. So what really happens is that tagging gets done to meet the capabilities of whatever player the person is using. That's the real bottleneck, and most of the time when someone pushes the boundries they end up with some crappy hack that works but doesn't scale in any way other than what the hack was supposed to solve.

7. ID3v2 is not part of many codec standards (like AAC not in a mp4 container) but folks go out and write taggers and players to violate the specs just because they don't know any better and propagate the problem.

In the end, I don't think that there is a single solution for everybody, and I guess the decision comes down to personal philosphy.

--Nathan