Sonice Input File Format

Before encoding ogg files, Sonice looks in its info directory to find out what tags should be added. This page documents what you can put in that directory to get the tags you want on your oggs.

One way to add tags is with vorbiscomment-styled files, which are a newline-separated list of KEY=value pairs. The other way is with YAML files that contain the same sort of information, but in a different form.

vorbiscomment-style Description

I haven’t bothered to add support for the older vorbiscomment-style input tag format. Support may be added at a future date.

YAML Description

There are four files (all of them optional) that control metadata and how oggs are produced. They are:

Each file, if it exists, must be a valid (at least according to the version of PyYaml installed) YAML file.

globalcomments.txt

This file contains a bunch of key:value pairs, and usually contains tags like artist, album, and date. An example:

artist: Moby
album: '18'
date: '2002'

Note that the items starting with a number are quoted for safety.

comments.txt

The comments.txt file is a list of key:value pairs, and usually contains tags like track. An example:

- title: Rhapsody in Blue
- title: An American in Paris
-
    title: Porgy and Bess
    part: Part 1
    comments: >
        Overture - Summertime - A woman is a sometime thing -
        Honey man - My man's gone now - I got plenty o' nuttin' -
        Bess, you is my woman now
-
    title: Porgy and Bess
    part: Part 2
    comments: >
        It ain't necessarily so - Strawberry woman - Crab man -
        I loves you, Porgy - There's a boat dat's leaving soon for New York -
        Oh where's my Bess - Oh Lawd, I'm on my way

A few things to notice:

globalpragmas.txt

Pragmas (a term borrowed from the C preprocessor) are a way to configure various switches through textfiles as opposed to doing so at the command line.

More information is available on the pragma list.

Example

One example is “Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men; the CD was poorly mastered and so its entire volume settings are off, and will confuse vorbisgain into quieting the entire CD. Since I don’t plan to set those sorts of settings manually, I’ll just turn them off by putting this in globalpragmas.txt: vorbisgain: -

pragmas.txt

The pragmas.txt file contains track-specific pragmas to tweak individual tracks to perfection.

More information is available on the pragma list.

Example

Consider this example comments.txt from a CD I have of Aaron Copland’s works:

- title: Fanfare for the Common Man
-
    title: Rodeo
    part:  Buckaroo Holiday
-
    title: Rodeo
    part:  Corral Nocturne
-
    title: Rodeo
    part:  Saturday Night Waltz
-
    title: Rodeo
    part:  Hoe-Down
-
    title: Quiet City
    performer: 
        - Philip Collins (trumpet)
        - William Harrod (French horn)
- title: Billy the Kid
- title: Appalachian Spring

By default, sonice will append (part) to a file if the ogg has the part tag defined, so the files will look like this by default:

Fanfare for the Common Man.ogg
Rodeo (Buckaroo Holiday).ogg
Rodeo (Corral Nocturne).ogg
Rodeo (Saturday Night Waltz).ogg
Rodeo (Hoe-Down).ogg
Billy the Kid.ogg
Appalachian Spring.ogg

However, let’s say that we want the Rodeo tracks to look like

Rodeo - Buckaroo Holiday.ogg
Rodeo - Corral Nocturne.ogg
...

instead.

What we’ll do is disable the part pragma: