WAV and metadata

[delange]

Hello,

Is there a way to configure Audacity so that it saves the metadata into the WAV file (by means of LIST chunk for example)?

Thank you.

[kozikowski]

I'm after Audacity to support Broadcast WAV which directly supports, among other things, iXML for comments. The danger of extending Microsoft WAV is producing a file nobody can read -- or at least your intended target.

Koz

[steve]

Is there a way to configure Audacity so that it saves the metadata into the WAV file (by means of LIST chunk for example)?

You can do that with Audacity 1.3.13
http://audacityteam.org/download/

[delange]

So I downloaded Audacity 1.3.13 Beta and tried the metadata editor on WAV files.
According to the help file and my tests, Audacity does not support Album Title, Trackno and Genre for WAV files. That is very strange because the LIST chunk has well defined frames for those:

IGNR Genre
IPRD Album
itrk Track number

What is the reason for that and can these frames be added so that Audacity supports them?

[Gale Andrews]

So I downloaded Audacity 1.3.13 Beta and tried the metadata editor on WAV files.
According to the help file and my tests, Audacity does not support Album Title, Trackno and Genre for WAV files. That is very strange because the LIST chunk has well defined frames for those:

IGNR Genre
IPRD Album
itrk Track number

What is the reason for that and can these frames be added so that Audacity supports them?

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

I think you may mean TRCK for "TrackNumber", but it's not supported for the same reason as IGNR - libsndfile.


Gale

[delange]

These are the basic frames required to enable music management:

IART (Artist)
IGNR (Genre)
INAM (Title)
IPRD (Album)
itrk (Track Number)

The current Audacity beta version doesn’t support three of the five basic frames which make the current tagging mechanism pretty useless. Many readers rely on that information for music management. Think about systems like Sonos and Squeezebox multi room systems. Is there any change of extending the supported frames so that this becomes a useful feature?

I think you may mean TRCK for "TrackNumber"

The ‘itrk’ frame is an AudioStation extension (noted by the lower case). This contains a string representation of the track number. This extension has been adopted by many applications who write LIST chunks in WAV files. A good and well know example is MediaMonkey.

[Gale Andrews]

We can add a vote for your request but nothing is likely to change before 2.0. As I said, it's a library problem, probably solvable by switching to taglib (a fair amount of subsidiary code we use is not ours, but that of other open source libraries).

Given we offer a lossless format (FLAC) with good metadata support in player applications, and WAV metadata has minimal support in popular player applications, there has been very little pressure to do anything. It would be nice to support BWF and RF64 too, but again our main library for PCM audio (libsndfile) doesn't support it.

How would you describe the benefit of itrk over TRCK?



Gale

[delange]

I know about FLAC but for some of us it is not an option. In my case, WAV is the only high quality format that is supported by all my digital music players I use. I don’t want to have several libraries to manage; one is already time consuming enough.

I have never seen the TRCK frame in the LIST chunks, nor is it documented in the LIST INFO sub chunks. The CD rippers I know all use itrk. So I guess that itrk is probably more widely spread and therefore the better choice.

Also, would you consider writing the LIST chunk at the bottom of the WAV file (after the ‘data’ chunk instead of before) instead of the top? Reason is that when you want to change the tagging (say album name changed) one doesn’t have to rewrite to complete WAV file. That hugely improves performance.