MetaData Missing from WAV files

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Hi,

I’ve recently recorded an old cassette tape and exported the tracks into both MP3 and WAV formats (the latter for subsequently burning an audio CD).

Whilst all the metadata was correctly ‘seen’ by Media Player and Audio CD Burner Studio for the MP3 versions, nothing but the .WAV filenames were ‘seen’ by both these bits of software. I used the same export process for both so don’t understand why metadata is present for MP3 but not .WAV files?

Can anyone suggest what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks.

2

Windows Media Player does not support metadata in WAV files.
It’s probably the same for Audio CD Burner Studio.
Few programs support metadata in WAV files.

3

Also Audacity itself only exports and reads a few WAV tags - see http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/WAV#Metadata .


Gale

4

Thanks Steve and Gale.

Do either of you know what software does support metadata for .WAV files?

5

Apart from Audacity, not much at all.
If you want a high quality “lossless” format with metadata, try FLAC or AIFF.

Windows Media Player does not support FLAC, but support can be added by installing “opencodecs” Directshow Filters for Ogg Vorbis, Speex, Theora and FLAC: Downloads
(these works for several other applications too).

6

iTunes, MediaMonkey and Tag&Rename all do but the results are not very interchangeable and if you set values in them then edit the file in Audacity you may lose some of the previously added metadata.

7

Are you sure iTunes supports metadata in WAV, Ed? It didn’t used to I feel sure, but does in AIFF.


Gale

8

Looks like it does on my iTunes - but not album-art

Peter.

9

I did test iTunes before I made the post as I rarely use it. I have absolutely no idea how any of these three programs are actually accomplishing this. Tag&Rename must be actually writing metadata to the file; the other two might be keeping an internal database and storing the information there without writing data to the file – I have not done any experimenting. I almost always use Tag&Rename to create metadata but when I do so on a WAV file MediaMonkey sometimes fails to recognize the metadata (but only sometimes ).

10

Just to confirm the latest version of iTunes still doesn’t see any of the WAV metadata exported by Audacity. If you add metadata to the file in iTunes, it doesn’t even write to the WAV, so it must store the information in its databases somewhere.

You’ll need to export as AIFF from Audacity if you want a lossless file where iTunes respects the Audacity metadata.


Gale