My original music is/was everything from 78s, 45s, LPs, 8 Tracks, Cassettes and CDs. My 8 tracks are long gone, as are most of my vinyl …
I’m confused because I thought you were saying Audacity was changing your tags, and of course none of those sources have any tags or embedded information. That’s why I put “original” in quotes.
Since you are manually tagging anyway, you might try [u]Mp3tag[/u].
I am trying to provide for the next great storage medium for audio and video by migrating as quickly as possible to MPEG … in hopes that there will be software available to move to that next platform.
You might want to consider a lossless format (such as FLAC) for archival purposes. High-quality, high-bitrate MP3 can be very good and it’s generally better than those analog formats, but it is lossy compression. A lossless format can be converted to another lossless format in the future if the need arises. You can convert FLAC to MP3 for convenience or “portable” use now while maintaining the original lossless archive. If you want a different lossy format in the future, you can create the lossy copy from the lossless original rather than making a 2nd generation lossy file.
Also, if you decide to do any “processing” in the future such as noise reduction or EQ, you can start with the lossless archive and avoid the 2nd generation lossy compression.
Lossless compression will create files that are smaller than uncompressed files, but larger than MP3, AAC, or other lossy compression.
Besides being smaller than WAV files, tagging is more-standardized and more supported for FLAC (and ALAC) than for WAVs.
FLAC and ALAC are not as widely supported as WAV, MP3, and AAC, but since it’s lossless that’s not important as long as software exists to convert it. And, there won’t be any generational loss.