I don't intend this to be a pissing contest at all. It's just that I so often see people say that Ogg tags are so much better without any basis for that judgement. Again, I'm not intending this to be a pissing contest, but lemme respond point by point.

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

That's actually part of my problem. That's an official page put out by the Ogg folks, the people in charge of the spec, and the best they can say is "Below is a proposed, minimal list of standard field names with a description of intended use." Umm, how hard would it have been to just say "These are the defined fields. More may come, but these are the basic standard." The fact that they're "proposed" within the standard that they defined themselves means that there's no official list.

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

This is a very, very, good point. My problem with it is basically along the lines of the fact that the developers had to assume that "proposed" meant "official".

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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.

I don't even understand this point. Everyone's making up their own tags, so there's no point in trying to come to a consensus about what they should be? The ultimate result of that sort of thinking is Oggs floating around that have "BEATSPERMINUTE" tags and others that have "BPM" tags and others that have "BEATRATE" tags, etc. ad infinitum.

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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.

But no mainstream developer is supporting it now, not because the audience is too small, but because they have no target to shoot for. Define a standard and then let the developers decide if it's worth their time to implement that part.

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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.

I don't understand how the fact that people tag things incorrectly is an argument against having "advanced" tags. The ultimate result of that thinking is "People can't even tag Track Name correctly, so why bother having a "Track Name" tag at all since it's likely to be wrong." Followed quickly by "Why do we have this tagging structure now that we've gotten rid of all the tags?"

Alternately, what you might be saying is that if someone writes a "BeatsPerMinute" tag when it's, in fact, supposed to be "BPM" (or something like that) then it's the user that's wrong. If so, that would be a very good point, if there was any tag that was defined as containing BPM information, but there's not. The problem is that you can legitimately put BPM information in a tag named "BPM" or "BEATSPERMINUTE" or "BEATRATE" because there is no standard. You could even put it in a tag named "PERFORMER", since its use is only suggested. WIthout standards, there's no way for anyone to say "yes, this is definitively BPM information."

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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."

I think that this refers to the idea that such tags should be encoded still within the same file, but as a logically separate part. As such, failing to call them tags is semantics at best. At the same time, they are arbitrarily limiting themselves.

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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.

But within ID3v2, the boundaries are way out there and well defined. You can define arbitrary tags if you want to with whatever data you want to put in there. WIth Ogg tagging, it's all boundaries. Even the notion that TITLE is the track name is going out an a limb, albeit a very sturdy one.

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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.

Nor is Ogg tagging part of many codec standards. You're saying that ID3v2 is worse because it's not universal while touting Ogg tagging, which is also not universal.

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I don't think that there is a single solution for everybody,

But there has to be. The fact of the matter is that you're not going to be writing the software that plays your Ogg files. Changes are that someone else is going to write them. And if they need BPM information, for example, then they're going to have to make up a tag on their own to hold it. But then maybe you want to play your Ogg on another device that also wants BPM information. But they've also come up with their own tag, which is not the same as the first developer's. So now you have to duplicate the tag. Then you find that you estimated BPM incorrectly. Now you've got to update two tags. But then you forget that the first developer wants it as a UTF-8-encoded integer while the other wants it as a decimal fraction indicating time between beats. And then another developer comes up with a BPM tag that indicates BPM at different points in the song. You get my point, I think. And you may be thinking, okay, but that's just small amounts of data. What happens when we start talking about images embedded in the tags and you've got three different ones?