Handling WAV & Meta data

Hi everyone.
I have quite a few folders which contain a single .wav and a .cue file.
I want to use a batch process to split all the major wavs but I still don’t understand where I should store their meta data.
I experimented on one file by splitting it manually and seeing what Roon makes of it. Since it has special chars ( ’ ) (it’s the Livin’ Blues! The apostrophe is a part of their name, isn’t it?), the album and artist names aren’t recognized.

What’s the most Roon friendly way of handling such situations? Should I first fix special chars and only then address the splitting issue, hoping that Roon will pick up the right meta data based on the file system? (folder structure / filenames)? Or is there a more full-proof method?

Thanks a bunch.

I’d recommend transcoding to FLAC and tagging.

Thank you.
May I ask why? Is it because you think it’s an overall simpler process than to find solutions for WAV tagging?
I’m persistent because I don’t want to get into the dilemma of whether or not I lost a tiny bit of sound quality by having to decode FLACs while playing, when I already now have the WAV format (most of my files FLAC, but still, I do prefer to keep the .WAV files if it’s not a major pain :).

There is no way to Tag wav. Good luck finding a solution. The load decoding flac is neglegible, and it is handled by Roon core. Wav does not make any sense at all.

Hi Matan,

[quote=“matan_offer, post:3, topic:13503”]
Is it because you think it’s an overall simpler process than to find solutions for WAV tagging?
[/quote]Yes, esp. given that wav files can’t be tagged and Roon does not support CUE file.

Danny the CTO of Roon, commented on Single File + CUE file in this post (there are also suggestions of software to help split up the file):

From an audio quality point of view, there is no difference between WAV and FLAC (or ALAC), the DAC will still be rendering the same audio data regardless of the lossless source format.

If you’re concerned about the extra workload the on the CPU (which is negligible on modern processors) then just make sure you DAC is fed via asynchronous USB or even better via a network bridge (Roon Ready / Running RAAT) that will fully decouple the DAC from the computer doing the decoding. The later further isolating the DAC from the electrically noisy PC environment.

Let us know how you get on, it may helps others in a similar situation.

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Dbpoweramp amp tags wav files fine.

Sorry no CUE files so can’t help there.

Hi Phil,

Whilst dBpoweramp can write ID3v2 and INFO, it is another matter if a 3rd party program can read from those tags.
Do you know if Roon can read them afterwards?

Personally I’d still advise the OP to convert to a lossless wrapper that inherently supports metadata such as FLAC or ALAC.

Not so relevant in this case but’s there’s also the checksum advantage as well, so the decoder knows if the file has been corrupted.

Roon has no issue, here, with WAV tracks tagged using Yate (on Mac OS, sorry)

Maybe look into AIFF? Uncompressed but has data management. I personally still have my library in individual WAV files and have no problem with Roon. No need for cue files.

hi zoom, thanks for the reply. I’m sorry, I might be missing something. Are you using WAVs or AIFFs?
In any case, I would have to do a conversion, and I’m using a PC, not Mac. In this case, I might as well convert to a non compressed FLAC, no?

I’m using WAV. I found it to be the best across all platforms, but I know the debate gets heated very quickly, hence my suggestion for AIFF, as its uncompressed and has metadata. Yes, you can also do uncompressed FLAC which brings you up to 3 choices for uncompressed. I personally haven’t tested uncompressed FLAC when I was testing AIFF, FLAC compressed, WAV, and ALAC. I never bothered since trying FLAC uncompressed as WAV worked perfectly.

Although, based on the discussion I’ve had with others in the industry and other users, they still prefer WAV over uncompressed FLAC.

FLAC encoding of audio (PCM) data incurs no loss of information, and the decoded audio is bit-for-bit identical to what went into the encoder. Each frame contains a 16-bit CRC of the frame data for detecting transmission errors. The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing.

Functionally there’s no difference between an uncompressed FLAC file and one that’s been compressed, the former just occupies a lot more disk space. FLAC is asymmetric in favor of decode speed. Decoding requires only integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for most perceptual codecs. Real-time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardware. On top of that, when using Roon for playback the FLAC file is decoded on the server side so the endpoint isn’t doing the decoding work.

Whilst Medeival cue splitter will do the job it has issues I’d consider deal-breakers:

  • Known bug: MPC engine can cause a bit of jitter at the beginning/end of tracks,
  • Limitations: MD5 checksum is not calculated for generated FLAC files.

You can use foobar2000 to batch automate the splitting, FLAC encoding (compressed or uncompressed) and tagging from cue sheet.

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