This has kind of been a pet peeve of mine for a while, but over the past few years of having 1:1 source-to-osu! metadata being prevalent in the game, the wildly varying formats of artists across the globe have been running havoc on osu!'s beatmap listing.
We're so accurate with this now that the vast inconsistencies in how artists and producers handle various aspects of song metadata are now pretty plain to see. The metadata crew have done pretty remarkably well in that regard.
Sources which have never considered the need for any sort of standard have created situations where we have tracks ranked on a daily basis with grammatical and syntactical errors. It looks horrible, and we have encountered situations where mappers have been forced to use flagrantly incorrect (from a grammatical and syntax standpoint) metadata so as to adhere to the current rule.
I think we can do better.
Thus, I propose the beginning of a global osu! metadata standard, wherein we effectively parse the metadata available for a given track and move it to something more uniform and consistent going forward. The reasoning behind this is that osu! is rapidly becoming more than just a game - the changes to osu!lazer align it towards the goal of becoming a platform, and a platform should aim to have clean and consistent presentation across all fronts wherever possible.
You may read the current draft of the metadata standard here.
To put it shortly, this is what the draft entails:
We're so accurate with this now that the vast inconsistencies in how artists and producers handle various aspects of song metadata are now pretty plain to see. The metadata crew have done pretty remarkably well in that regard.
Sources which have never considered the need for any sort of standard have created situations where we have tracks ranked on a daily basis with grammatical and syntactical errors. It looks horrible, and we have encountered situations where mappers have been forced to use flagrantly incorrect (from a grammatical and syntax standpoint) metadata so as to adhere to the current rule.
I think we can do better.
Thus, I propose the beginning of a global osu! metadata standard, wherein we effectively parse the metadata available for a given track and move it to something more uniform and consistent going forward. The reasoning behind this is that osu! is rapidly becoming more than just a game - the changes to osu!lazer align it towards the goal of becoming a platform, and a platform should aim to have clean and consistent presentation across all fronts wherever possible.
You may read the current draft of the metadata standard here.
To put it shortly, this is what the draft entails:
- A general return to 'common sense first' formatting in ambiguous situations
- Enforced whitespace and syntax correctness in all metadata titles
- TV Size designation for anime OP/ED cuts enforced to TV Size only, regardless of source metadata
- Default to using source tagging on mashup tracks where appropriate
- Default to using producer track name for Vocaloid or Vocaloid-like tracks
- Syntax standard for common metadata formats and terms, such as feat., vs., with, and (&)
- Standard for handling Character Voice (CV) designations
- Standards for handling character replacement for common unicode characters