Are the WAV files named and organized in any useful way. If so, you can use mp3tag “Convert - fllename - Tag” to automatically create the proper tags.
For example, if your WAV files are organized as follows:
music\The Beatles\Abbey Road\01 - Come Together.wav
you can use “Convert - filename -Tag” to create artist tag (The Beatles), album tag (Abbey Road), track tag (01), and title tag (Come Together).
the code for above would be: %artist%\%album%\%track% - %title%
(and of course you can do this as one large batch, not album at a time).
The same principles work if you have composer, etc. in your file or directory names.
Yes, my files are meticulously organized and standardized. Appreciate your suggestions but Songkong responded to my inquiry and told me that their software was the only one capable of “reading” non-standard Naim generated metadata in WAV files. It is certainly true that Roon cannot read it. I can apparently trial Songkong free for 30 days so I will try that first.
Yes, you can try that first. But keep in mind that my suggestion has nothing to do with using the Naim generated metadata. mp3tag will create new tags for your WAV files using the information from the file organization (folders and file names) rather than from any other metadata tags. This works very well for capturing basic tags with well organized libraries. Of course the limit is that it can only fill in tags from info that is based on file folders and file names and of course there are many tag fields that are not contained in our naming structures.
I’ll tske your 2 pence of advice, thank you. As long as I can convert it to cents (lol).
I wasn’t planning on letting Songkong edit my metadata which I consider virtually perfect or 99.9% accurate, at least in those field Naim allows me to edit (Cover Art, Title, Artist and Track). All I want it to do is repackage my metadata as is.
If I understand you correctly,. that mp3tag uses my perfectly edited metadata to creat Tags rather than turning to outside databases, then yes, that is very appealing. I really don’t want my metadata changed, just properly tagged.
Sorry. No, it doesn’t use your metadata at all. Just the implied information from your folder names and file names. If you have extensive metadata, this option is not likely good for your situation. Good luck
If I read the Naim Forums post correctly, what you can do is convert all your .wav files into .flac, either directly on the Naim device, or via software that Naim provides.
I have neither the interest nor the patience to start a religious war, moreso with flat-earthers, so I’ll steer clear of questions about quality (or worse, PRaT) loss, but I will state the word “lossless” has a meaning when it comes to music files.
That meaning is that a .wav and a .flac file are bit identical once they’re played back - in other words, and if I were to make an analogy, if your music file were a text file, then while going from .wave to .mp3 wld rmv vwls (to a different degree depending on bitrates), going from .wav to .flac will not remove anything at all, making it indistinguishable from the source.
I do not have a Naim device that can convert from WAV to FLAC (or vice versa). Apparently the Naim HDX can do that but not my Naim Uniti Core. I will be working with Songkong software which can package the Naim metadata with WAV instead of separately, making it transportable into non-Naim opportunities.
Janet, I was going to lay out some best practices, but I got sidetracked on other projects.
To address one directive, you really should duplicate your entire library – or at least a portion there of – and first do a trial of Songkong WAV to FLAC with embedded metadata. Keep your original library untouched. Because you are pleased with the current state of your library, you do not want to make destructive changes without a path to undo those changes if you are not satisfied.
Ah, my wrong - for some reason, thought the uniti serve did it, and assumed the core would as well.
So I guess they’ve decided .wav with sidecar metadata is the new DIN or something . If I may, @WiWavelength’s approach seems sane… If you have the time once you’re done, you might want to consider transcoding to a lossless format with universally readable embedded metadata (something like FLAC, for example)…
Andrew,
Yes, definitely I will make several copies for working/testing. I am not going to do anything to jeopardize all the work I’ve put in so far ripping and editing.
But so far as I can tell Songkong doesn’t do FLAC. Okay by me as I prefer WAV anyway. Disregarding the concerns that some have about whether FLAC sounds as good as WAV, just on principle I prefer a file that doesn’t undergo conversion. Now that I know there is no longer a downside to using WAV, I will stick with WAV.
Janet, you really need to move on from WAV and minimal or proprietary metadata if you ever want your personally groomed library to be transportable. Otherwise, when you depart Naim, if/when you depart Roon, etc., you run into the same issue. Many/all of your edits cannot go with you.
There is a big downside in that the WAV file format does not support tagging… (I’m aware there are proprietary systems that do, but they don’t conform to a public standard, and thus interoperability is an issue).
FLAC and ALAC both have documented standards for imbedded metadata.
Your call, but please chose the path you take with open eyes.
In response to advice to reconsider staying with WAV, rather to move to FLAC instead, I was relying on information in Songkong documentation.
FWIW, SongKong says that now that WAV supports ID3, it makes WAV more powerful than FLAC. See paragraph below, a quote from SongKong documentation:
“Wav did not used to have good metadata support but Wav now supports metadata using the ID3 [http:// id3.org] format, the same flexible format supported by Mp3 and Aiff. This format is well understood and is more powerful then the metadata format used by Flac, so now you can have the ultimate audio format and the ultimate metadata format.
Songkong, which I plan to buy, is primarily tagging software, so while I am definitely naive on these issues, I have hope that it’ll turn out okay to stick with WAV.
The version on SongKong referenced in the link I posted earlier provides a means to extract the accompanying metadata from Naim WAV files. However, it would seem (from the page) that your Naim can also extract files to FLAC with your metadata intact.
If this is correct, that would be the way to go and you probably don’t need SongKong. The objective is to recover your metadata contained in the proprietary amginfo.xml file associated with each WAV file.
. If I may,