BWF riff tag Qs

[MrSinatra]

hi all, first post!

i searched but couldn't find the answer, this came close:

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... ag#p100076

but i have some questions about wav files. i am fairly versed in mp3 and flac, but not as familiar with wav.

first of all, your 44.1 16 bit wav is a BWF file, right? just a normal PCM file, right?

i have seen that audacity can actally put native tags (metadata) into wavs, something i didn't think was possible, but the tag values are fairly limited. what are the tags called? riff tags? what is riff in this context?

where is the standard for tagging bwf files on the web? the specs i see seem to be about the audio protion of the format, not the tagging.

in addition, i have long heard that if you do something "tricky" you can put id3 tags into a wav. my understanding was that doing so was a hack, and strictly speaking broke the format/container, even if the file still worked. however, i have seen other people contend that being able to manipulate the riff to stick id3 in is actually not breaking the spec...

i wonder what anyone thinks about that, and if they can link to official documents showing things one way or the other? thx!

[steve]

first of all, your 44.1 16 bit wav is a BWF file, right? just a normal PCM file, right?

Exported WAV files are "normal" WAV files (Microsoft PCM WAV). They are not BWF.

Tags in WAV files are not "standard" - that is, the published standards for Microsoft PCM WAV format does not specify metadata, but it does not prohibit metadata either. Microsoft PCM WAV is a subset of RIFF, and the specification for RIFF allows user data to be written to the (optional) INFO chunk.

See here for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_I ... _Info_Tags
You will find the relevant specifications if you follow the links from that page.

[kozikowski]

BWF is sometimes called Broadcast WAV. That's a much more advanced product that natively supports multiple output channels, metadata, very large file sizes, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_Wave_Format

Audacity doesn't support that. It's a Feature Request.

Koz