Audacity Forum

I have just noticed that when I convert/export my music library with reasonably exhaustive meta data, the only tags that appear to be carried forward are Artist and Title.

Is it possible to somehow expand this via Preferences?

If you are exporting to WAV then that format does not support a wide range of tags.

PGA wrote:If you are exporting to WAV then that format does not support a wide range of tags.

Actually I'm exporting **from** WAV (to FLAC).

How did you put exhaustive meta data INTO a WAV file?

I was looking at this last year, and found there are multiple standards for putting meta data into WAV files and damned little software supports any of it, beyond the artist and title.

hellosailor wrote:How did you put exhaustive meta data INTO a WAV file?

Mainly with Media Monkey, but in recent months I have largely dumped that and moved over to Foobar2000 thanks to a reco from Steve; still having a little trouble getting the skinning/layout spot on, but overall I'm delighted with the switch.

i don't know about the latest versions, but when I looked at them, neither would put extensive tags in WAVs that could be read anywhere else. Tagging WAV files is like milking unicorns, you won't find many people doing it.

hellosailor wrote:i don't know about the latest versions, but when I looked at them, neither would put extensive tags in WAVs that could be read anywhere else. Tagging WAV files is like milking unicorns, you won't find many people doing it.

Wow! You’re so knowledgeable you are able to dismiss my comments out of hand and take the piss without carrying out even the most rudimentary research -- very impressive.

I guess I’d better delete all my imaginary Genre, year, Album Title, Producer, BPM, etc, etc data quick, now that you have disabused me of the possibility of its existence.

Shay, i did say that I don' tknow about the latest versions--but the old ones wouldn't do that, and most software won't recognize it. Since you didn't say how many fields you were populating, you leave us to guess what 'massive' is. Since you don't mention versions, you leave us to guess, again. GIGO.

And it will still come down to "there's no widely supported standard for that". If you don't enjoy hearing it, that won't change it. As you've just found out, whatever they are doing now, is not being supported. When and if that changes, do fell free to pitch in and let the rest of us know.

The format "WAV (Microsoft) PCM" is a type of "RIFF" file http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_I ... ile_Format

In the Microsoft specification for WAV files, metadata is not defined. There is no "standard" for metadata in WAV files.
Audacity and some other programs offer limited support for metadata in WAV files as metadata is "allowed" according the the RIFF standard and is not "prohibited" by the WAV standard.

The RIFF standard allows metadata to be stored in the INFO chunk. You can find a brief summary of the most commonly supported RIFF INFO data here: http://www.daubnet.com/en/file-format-riff

Audacity currently supports the following metadata in WAV files:
Artist Name,
Track Title,
Year,
Comments.

As there is no official standard, there is no guarantee that other programs will support this or other metadata in WAV files.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV#Metadata

There may be additional subchunks in a Wave data stream. If so, each will have a char[4] SubChunkID, and unsigned long SubChunkSize, and SubChunkSize amount of data.

Source: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/422/ ... aveFormat/

One such SubChunkID may be ID3, in which case the WAV file specification allows fully for the inclusion of standards compliant ID3 v2 tags of the common garden variety found in MP3 files.

Whether Microsoft recognises this as a standard I neither know nor care; I don't event know how to launch Windows Media Player and haven't used it for donkeys years.

But the simple truth is that for me it is a de facto standard used on the players I have an interest in; Media Monkey and Foobar (and Traktor). The same would logically seem to hold true for all users of those popular media players.

As for Audacity the decision to apparently not even include the 'Genre' tag specified by Microsoft must be a choice. Fair enough. However, please note that your implementation of the tag 'Year' appears to be buggy.