Missing metadata after importing WAV files from itunes

Hello,

I started a 2 week trial last week. Unfortunately, I am fnding that most of the meta data maybe 70% of my albums in iTunes have not been trannsferred properly when importing to roon - hence most of the cover art work is missing.

For example - let’s take Mezzanine from Massive attack. When importing into Roon, this album appears as “Massive Attack - Mwzzanine” with unknown artist. This is happening across probably 70% of all the albums imported - while with the remainder - the metadata appears properly in Roon. It’s very inconsistent.

When I import the same files into Audrivana plus - I have no problems. All the metadata that iTunes has been able to obtain is transferred to Audrivana. My entire iTunes library (wav files) is properly classified - ie name of album, name of artist, name of track etc.

If I can’t solve this problem - it’s hard for me to justify subscribing as a paying user.

Within the Roon Perferences - I have enabled the storage option from ITunes as: This Mac -> Macintosh HD -> Users - tarekshehabi -> Music

I hope to get some feedback on this please.

Many thanks

The problem here is that WAV files don’t have file tags.

iTunes can tell Roon about your playlists, but my guess is that all the metadata you’re seeing in iTunes isn’t actually stored in the files that Roon is importing – it’s stored in the iTunes database.

This is one of the reasons many people opt for FLAC or ALAC files, which both have full support for file tags. When you edit those file formats in iTunes, the information is generally written back into the files – since WAV files don’t generally support file tags, there’s no where for the info to be written to, and it just stays in the iTunes database.

All of that said, file tags aren’t the only way that Roon can identify albums. We also look at folder structure and file numbering.

So, if you have 5 WAV files numbered in a folder as 1 - So What.WAV and 2 - Freddie Freeloader and so on, we will generally recognize that album as Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue, even though there are no file tags. But, that requires that all the tracks on that album are in a single folder, and are numbered in a way that Roon understands.

A clearer sense of how your files are organized and named on your hard drive would help us understand why these albums aren’t working – feel free to post some screenshots (instructions at the end of this post) of how the files are stored and we’ll see if we can help.

Another option would be to look into converting these files to a format that supports tagging – as you might guess, our identification process does a lot better when we have information about the files.

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Well the problem is that iTunes doesnt support reading/writing metadata to WAV tags, although interestingly it does support reading/writing to AIFF tags which are very similar.

Actually Wav has always supported a very simple set of metadata in the INFO tag, and for some years there has been support for using the ID3 tag just like MP3s do. There is plenty of software that support this these days http://wavmetadata.blogspot.co.uk/

Have Roon considered adding support for this ?

There may actually be times when we do read file tags out of WAV files, I’d need to double-check.

That said, if you’re editing metadata in iTunes (like I believe @Tarek_Shehabi is) I don’t believe it’s going to save those edits back into the files – the information is only stored in the iTunes database.

If you have WAV files with tags that aren’t being read into Roon, feel free to PM me a link to some media and we can take a look @paultaylor.

Hello Mike,

thank you for your reply.

Let me go into a little detail.

For the past few years I have been ripping my cds into iTunes as wav files. However, I usually do not rip the entire cd - rather i go through each cd and only rip the songs i really like. This has been a laborious process.

I have included a few screen shots of the iTunes library.

If by some quirk, my own methods mean that I can’t really use Roon - well its ok, I appreciate trying the product for 2 weeks. Again I am a little confused why Audivrana could import the “metadata” or “tags” as it appears in my iTunes library….

If there is anyway for me to configure Soon so that it properly recognizes my Library please let me know. However, I am not going to spend another 3 years re-ripping my collection into FLAC files…

Many thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Tarek

In iTunes the WAV metadata is not stored in the Wavs themselves but in the iTunes library. This data is available and you could write some applescript to copy the metadata from iTunes into the Wavs themselves, there is probably a script on dougscripts thats does this for you.I expect Audiovana have written a script to copy the data from the iTunes lib into the Audiovana lib.