This article goes off the deep end a bit on a tangent about modifying documents to track their history. That play count field in the ID3 tag was a hack and almost nobody used it. The idea was to allow the metadata to be shared between different programs, but it immediately ran into a snag when you remembered that files can be copied and there was no mechanism to synchronize the updates across all copies of the file.
Automatically tagging files with information that might be personally identifiable (bought media from retailer X on date Y) is also the sort of thing that turns off users in a hurry. The possible benefits are far outweighed by the potential problems.
I absolutely get that. In many ways what excited me about seeing all these frames was the sense of possibility completely untempered by practicalities.
I wrote it in the spirit of taking the idea and going with it, off the deep end if you wish :)
I'm thinking of some engineer just doing his job, imagines a future where files dont exist and information is stored relationally in some sort of universal shared database, but tasked with designing a file format for everything you could possibly want to link to a piece of sound, and as a way to protest the broken design came up with outrageous tag specs to exaggerate the shortcomings of flat files, back when filesystem technology was still frontier
> Automatically tagging files with information that might be personally identifiable (bought media from retailer X on date Y) is also the sort of thing that turns off users in a hurry.
iTunes supports play count and always has, and I and friends have made use of it extensively (albeit for ourselves not shared) including for things like smart playlists where it's great for natural curation/discovery. Now that it's mentioned, I don't actually know if iTunes made use of the ID3v2 tag or its own database for that. Our music libraries are synced across devices and it seems to carry around fine, or at least close enough since a bit of fuzziness doesn't actually matter much in this case. A play count of 60 vs one of 61 or 62 isn't particularly meaningful since both show roughly that this is a song you have listened to quite a bit.
It is useful though. In the iTunes implementation at least I think (I haven't checked in a decade or more, it was like this once but not sure about the latest) it only advances when a song is completed, not when it's started. So having a song come up one doesn't like that they immediately skip will appear in the number as the years go by.
Automatically tagging files with information that might be personally identifiable (bought media from retailer X on date Y) is also the sort of thing that turns off users in a hurry. The possible benefits are far outweighed by the potential problems.