[vorbis] International Standard Recording Code

Moritz Grimm
Wed, 07 Feb 2001 08:31:59 -0000

Hi!

First, here's some background information: Some friends and I are making
music with our computers for some years now. We release our tracks on
the Internet for free for private use, both in the original module
format and currently MP3. Within the next weeks or months (depending on
the leisure time i get), our web site www.kolabore.de will be vorbisised
for reasons I won't have to explain in here. :)

While we definitely plan to continue releasing our music without asking
money for it from private persons that have internet access, we're also
interested in protecting and commercially distributing it through the
label we're currently building up. Therefore, I got us an ISRC
Registrant Code.

The ISRC contains 12 characters and is built up like this one:

     DE             R46             01                00001

Country Code     Registrant   Year of Reference    5 numbers to
(ISO, 2 chars)   (3 chars)    (2 numbers, 01	   identify the
                              means 2001)	   recording

The registrant code can be something between (including) 001 and ZZZ.
The year of reference is the year in which the ISRC was assigned to a
recording.

Currently, the ISRC only identifies recordings (both audio and
audio/video), but it is also supposed to replace the fearsome label code
within the next 3 to 5 years. It is quite important for the music
industry, because it is designed for every digital media (especially
CD-A, where it is placed in the Q-Channel) and (will) allow(s) to
determine, which artists have to be compensated, e.g. for digital radio
or internet broadcasting. The ISRC together with OGG doesn't make free
music (or videoclips) less free, but it helps artists to be compensated
without forcing anybody to use these sucky codecs the music industry
would like to see.

IMHO, OGG should be capable to store the ISRC somewhere else than the
comment string, though. It would be pretty great if there was a reserved
place for it, similar to the ARTIST or TITLE field. This would have
several advantages:

- Users that want to read the blahblah the author or provider of the
file writes into the comments usually don't want to see some strange
numbers.
- Software that makes use of the ISRC can read it easily because the
field has a name it can look for.
- The ISRC field has a fixed format: 12 characters, the first 5 are
alphanumeric, the remaining 7 are only numbers. A good way to detect and
prevent errors.

I really hope that this could be achieved without changing the format
and/or making current decoders useless. I doubt that the ISRC is worth
that effort, but if not, implementing it would be great.

Please let me know what you think about it and if there are any
questions left, I'll do my best to answer them.

Bye,

Moritz

P.S.: FYI, the visual representation of the ISRC is also standardized.
The upper example would be "ISRC DE-R46-01-00001", of course without
the
quotes. Note the preceding "ISRC" and the dashes.