Metadata Tags in WAV Files

[Tom Dennehy]

Using Audacity 1.3.14-Beta on Windows 7.

I complete the following metadata tags for indivdiual track export as WAV: Artist, Track Title, Album Title, Track #, Genre, Year.

But the only tags that seem to be written to the WAV file header are Artist, Track Title, and Year.

Is this a bug, or are there options/settings somewhere that I am not enabling to publish full metadata.


Thanks in advance,
TGD

[steve]

But the only tags that seem to be written to the WAV file header are Artist, Track Title, and Year.

It also saves "Comment", though you're not using that.
No it's not a bug. That is the extent of Audacity's support for metadata in WAV files. Most programs don't support any metadata in WAV files.

[Tom Dennehy]

Audacity is currently writing the following chunks to the INFO section of a WAV file it exports:

IART: Artist Name
INAM: Track Name
ICRD: Year

See attachment for "Start Me Up." [attachment=1]Start Me Up (Aud).txt[/attachment]

Windows Media Player (WMP) writes the following chuncks to the INFO section of a WAV file ripped from CD:

IART: Artist Name
INAM: Track Name
IPRD: Album Name
IGNR: Genre
ITRK: Track #

See attachment for "Neighbors." [attachment=0]Neighbors (WMP).txt[/attachment]

Without the Album Name and Track #, all titles exported as WAV from Audacity collpase into an "Unknown Album" heap when imported into media players like WMP, foobar and JRiver. Even if you hand-edit the album names per title, it is a time-prohibitive task to enter the # for each track to recover playback in album order. Both tasks that must be repeated every time you migrate to a new media player.

All three media players cited recognize and accept the metadata provided by WMP for CD ripping.

My question: if Audacity currently exports three fields from its metadata into WAV files (four, if you include comment), is it an unreasonable request to export six fields? (Adding IPRD, IGNR, ITRK.)


Cheers,
TGD

[Gale Andrews]

Please see:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/WAV#Metadata

It's essentially a library problem - if we updated to a tag library called taglib we would have proper support for WAV tags. I'll add your vote for better support. Windows Media Player has I think only supported tags in WAV files in recent versions, but I agree we should not get left behind. I have raised the priority of the issue in our bug/enhancement tracking system (which still doesn't mean it will get done anytime soon unfortunately).



Gale

[Tom Dennehy]

I have the Audacity source because I wanted to take a swing at building for Windows with the Steinberg ASIO SDK for 24-bit recording. If I updated taglib to write the additional fields, would you accept a user submission?


Cheers,
TGD

[steve]

The Audacity developers generally prefer not to modify third party libraries as they would then need to maintain their modified library forever. Using a modified library can also cause compatibility problems if the computer on which Audacity is installed already uses an unmodified version of that library. On the other hand, if the library is modified upstream by the developers of that library, then Audacity can be modified to take advantage of any additional functionality that the new version offers.

[Gale Andrews]

I have the Audacity source because I wanted to take a swing at building for Windows with the Steinberg ASIO SDK for 24-bit recording. If I updated taglib to write the additional fields, would you accept a user submission?

The developers are always happy to consider patches, however when I said "updated to taglib" that meant update to using it - we don't currently use or link to it at all. So there should not be any need for a locally patched taglib which would be a potential problem as Steve said. If you want to build taglib, you'll need to add it back into the audacity.sln solution file for MSVC.

Sometime we also want to support the additional timestamp/archival metadata supported in Broadcast WAV. Libsndfile (the PCM importer/exporter we use) supports that metadata but we don't.


Gale