I have many music files stored on a hard disc drive and on my iMac and have recently transferred them to roon (they ended up in the tracks section)
The tracks are in the WAV format and have no tag info. It is my understanding that to add tag info to the wav files I must first convert them to flac and then add the tag info using third party software. Is this true or can I add the tag info directly to the wav files? If so how.
Any recommendations of third party software providers would be appreciated
I just use the tagging in windows for basic information and Roon picks it up.
After we have mixed recording from live events we host, I generally get WAV files so I know it works.
I use MediaMonkey along with the free Discogs plug-in for accurate tagging.
I think it’ll also perform a bulk conversion for you…take a look here.
Contrary, to opinions I have seen expressed elsewhere on this forum, you can tag WAV files, i.e. FLAC is not needed.
1 Like
Slim, that’s very interesting. How do you Tag directly from WAV?
In windows, right click a file and select id3 tags. Edit away.
I interpreted that question to ask whether only FLACs have tags, as some FLAC adherents have suggested. My answer was that any program that rips WAVs also adds tags.
I think at heart the issue is that the WAV format has very limited support for tagging, unlike FLAC. There are potential traps for the unwary; see this article, for example.
In Windows, I suspect that tags added to WAV files are actually ending up as metadata in the NTFS file system. That’s fine so long as you shuffle the files around in Windows. However, if they are transferred to Linux or Mac file systems, the jury may be out as to whether the tags will be preserved…
In Roon, you only need the basics, and not even that if you edit yourself. I tag Album name, Artist and track names plus a date and that’s all I need. The rest can be done in Roon
I have used various ripping programs over the past 20 years, starting with Windows Media Player. I’ve never had an issue having tags created at the time of rip being able to be read by various media players, e.g. JRiver, Roon, the less than artful native players on Roku and Plex, and the players on various DAPs. Created under Windoes and readable in Mac and vice versa. I understand that if one creates a special tagged field under JRiver, for example, then that tag is carried only on JRivers library, of course, but isn’t that case true for any file format? The user tags that are created in Roon, and even on FLACs, don’t those particular tags exist only in Roon?
The short answer is: it depends.
In the case of Roon, then all metadata that is created exists only within the Roon database, it is never written back into the files as file metadata. I can’t say what the case is for JRiver - I’ve never found it an application that I would want to use. For custom tags created by dbPoweramp and the like, they may exist as custom tags within file metadata, but there’s no guarantee that they will be read and acted upon by other applications.
It seems to me that, to use an analogy, the ID3 tags are the QWERTY of the audio metadata world - we are constrained by history, and it’s problematic to throw it all out and start again with a properly designed system. In the photo metadata world, there’s been a transition from the IPTC IIM tags to tags based on XMP, which has provided a firm basis for an extensible system that is far more future-proof than what we seem to be confronted with in the audio world.
Ah, you see this is my point. Customized tags are in truth only guaranteed to be readable by the originating program. So all that stuff by the FLACers about the unreliability of WAV tags, as a reason to prefer FLACs over WAVs, is a bit of a straw man. The truth is that the basic tags that one would expect are in WAV files. Whether there is a governing committee (as FLACers seem to imply for FLAC files) for WAV files or not, there seems to be at least a casual agreement about what and where tags and, for that matter, cover art should be incorporated into the actual files.
Don’t misunderstand, I don’t want to further beat a dead horse or to be snarky. I may want to convert my lowly 300+ albums to FLAC. I am simply trying to realize the truth among all the back and forth. I have no emotional commitment to WAV unlike, it seems, FLACers have to FLACS. Until I began Googling as a result of this controversy being raised for me because of another post, I was ignorant of the vitriol that exists between the two groups.
WAVers say that FLAC music doesn’t sound as good. On the one hand, I can understand this, as the lossless format of FLACs achieved with a smaller file size than WAVs would indicate some kind of encrypting. Where there is encryption there must be decryption and I suppose that could be prone to errors, checksums not withstanding. Nevertheless, I am thinking that any supposed difference is only a placebo effect, or is too slight to be distinguished by my aged equipment (biological, i mean, not electrical).
I have plenty of storage and it’s cheap, so file size isn’t important to me, and really how much of a music library does one have to have on their DAP at any one time? I do care about any additional processing, both from a cpu standpoint and on general principles, that might be needed for FLACs encryption/decryption processing.
Still up in the air. Maybe my future rips will be FLACs. On the other hand, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
If you, or others, care to respond, thanks.
BTW - I have come to despise JRiver. Mostly because of the CEO and his highhanded forum moderation, but that’s a story for another place. I now use JRiver only for movies.
there is such a thing as uncompressed FLAC you know.
There is no encryption. FLAC, ALAC, APE etc. can be thought of as winzip for audio. Just as extracting a word doc from a zip archive yields the original document, so decoding a losslessly compressed audio file yields the original audio stream. It’s not prone to error. Those that argue WAV sounds better than FLAC generally do so because they fall into one of the following camps: 1) they don’t understand how it works or 2) they perceive the extra step of decoding causes sound quality to suffer because the PC is doing some decoding, which is not the case with a WAV file.
As to tags, tagging any of the lossless file formats is generally easier than doing so with WAV files because their specification makes allowance for tagging and most taggers are thus able to read/write/edit them whereas few can read/write/edit tags embedded in WAV files. Similarly tags in lossless file formats are more likely to be recognised by audio players than is generally the case with tags embedded in WAV files.
Ultimately go with whatever you’re comfortable with.
I confess that I have never given a thought as to which is better: WAV or FLAC. I originally started out with WAV, then moved to WMA Lossless, and from there to FLAC. I live in a Windows world, and ever since Windows supported FLAC natively, I’ve never looked back.
I wouldn’t bother converting your WAV’s, life is too short. I would rip in FLac for the future to save disk space and it’s easy. There are no discernible sound differences in Roon or Sooloos in my experience. Tag as you go and enjoy the music.
Only trouble is that I have about 9000 files (songs) and it would be beyond my patience level to individually tag each one. Is there a bulk tagging system I can operate out of windows. ( I also have the music stored on my hard disk drive )) I have checked third-party software and have not come away enthused about their ability to do it. Is there anyone I could send the hard disk drive to and have them do it for a fee?
Surely they have song title and artist? If so, point Roon at them and see.
Picard, jaikoz, puddletag
If you’re in the UK, make a backup, package it securely and send it to me. I’ll send it back in flac, tagged and at no cost (other than shipping, which is on you). Tag metadata will depend on whether the albums and artists are mainstream or some obscure stuff nobody’s heard of.
1 Like