I switched to Audacity from Adobe Audition after being told that Audacity would not damage the existing APE tags. I was told wrong. Is there a setting in Audacity or an add on that will allow me to edit a file and export it while allowing APE (and other) tags to pass through unaltered ? They contain timing information (how long the song intro is, what days and hours the song may be scheduled, etc) and manually re-entering all this data would be a monumental task. Had the same thing happen with MP3TAG years ago and the author made me a special BETA version that has no effect on APE tags…that was a godsend.
I don’t know anything about APE tags but Audacity has a limited [u]metadata editor[/u].
When you export a file you are creating a completely new file so it’s not as easy as “passing through” or “keeping” the tags. New tags must be written to a new file.
…And things get complicated when converting from one format to another because different formats use different tagging standards. You might not be doing that but a lot of people do so they often have to “fix-up” the tags in the new file.
Yes you were told wrong, unless they meant that Audacity will not damage the existing APE tags in your original files.
Audacity does not directly edit files. When you import a file, Audacity copies the audio data into the project. When you export your edited audio, a new file is created. The original file is not altered in any way unless you overwrite it on export.
On importing a file into an empty Audacity project, supported metadata tags are also copied into the project. Only the most common standard metadata tags are supported. APE tags are not among the supported tags. (Cover Art is not supported either). Attempting to support all metadata tags would be a huge programming effort that we don’t have the resources to do.