SongKong does do FLAC, my library is 95+% Flac and it has done many of them
One thing you may wish to consider if you want to convert WAV to FLAC is JRiver, it has a 30 day demo, it will convert and has an excellent Tag editor
To buy it’s only $60 if you like it. I use it for most of my Tag maintenance, as well as Dlna
Thanks for the suggestion, but I’m actually relieved to remain in WAV. In spite of the many assurances to the contrary, I feel uncomfortable with the possibility that audio might be compromised when using compressed files. Since I have the space to afford to use WAV (and assuming I can struggle through learning to use Songkong), I’ll continue with WAV.
WAV with tags of any kind is not really standard and not implemented well in many players; some even may just not play the files, calling them corrupt. I tested tagged WAV before I made the decision and found it more problematic. So, I converted all my files to flac from wav years ago and manually re-tagged them (about 5000) and it was a fantastic decision.
Before you do anything on a grand scale, I would run a test with one album first to verify that Roon will indeed actually read the meta data from the tagged WAV files.
Also, test your concerns, convert one album to FLAC and A/B the FLAC and the WAV versions. The concern years ago about flac was that un-compression takes extra CPU processing and that affects things. Today’s CPUs are so much more powerful that the un-compression barely even registers as a task anymore. RoonServer converts the FLAC to PCM before it even sends it to your DAC anyway.
Agree.And actually it is the original encoding of the FLAC file that takes the work, more with higher compression (8). But this is a one time thing. Decoding is essentially the same no matter what, and as noted is trivial with any cpu newer than 15 years old.
dbPoweramp added an uncompressed FLAC version a few years ago in order to cater to the truly paranoid about lossless compression. These files are just WAV files in a FLAC container. This allows one to have uncompressed files but the advantage of FLAC tagging and embedded CRCs.
Speaking of CRCs, in my opinion the FLAC format most important benefit is the fact that the file has an embedded CRC hash along with the tags. This allows one to run a batch test conversion on all of ones files and get feedback as to whether any of the files report as corrupted (calculated CRC doesn’t match the CRC created at time of ripping). I can run a test conversion on all 100,000 of my files in a few hours to confirm no corruption. This is particularly useful after creating a new backup drive.
WAV (or ALAC) does NOT have this capability. One would have to actually play each file to determine if corrupted.
Anyhow, people should use what they want, but I always try to point out the CRC issue as too much of FLAC discussion revolves around space saving.
Yes, good point about dbPowerAmp’s uncompressed FLAC option, and, CRC error checking. Too many people think that just because you have it on a hard drive means it is safe; bit-rot happens.
And worst case scenario is when one has religiously backed up to several backup drives, and overwrites a good backup file with a corrupted version, without knowing it. I’ve seen this happen more than once.
HI, AFAIK for Wav files SongKong is the only way to get data from the proprietery Naim metadata files into the Wav files themselves. If you just enable this option and nothing else Songkong will extract this metadata from Naim files without attempting to add additional metadata from MusicBrainz or Discogs.
The metadata is stored at the end of the Wav file using the ID3 format (this is the same as used by Mp3, Aiff and Dsf), it is stored after the audio and has no effect on sound quality. Most newer applications do support Wav ID3 metadata, although true that older apps probably do not, so it depends on what you are using.
Without doing this simply converting files form Wav to Flac will not convert the metadata since Naim do not store the metadata in the wav files themselves.
Hi Janet,. can I offer you any further assistance.
Hi Mike, you can run SongKong in preview and then run again in non preview. But the reason the workflow is not preview/review changes/confirm like Jaikoz is because it was envisaged that SongKong would be run on whole collections, therefore there would be too many changes for users to review properly. Also if reviews came up throughout the duration of process this would pause workflow and be very annoying, if it was kept until the end then there would be a long delay after confirm changes whilst all the files were saved.
Instead we took another approach, as well as changing the files themselves SongKong stores the changes in its database. So at a later date if you encounter a problem you can Undo all changes to a folder or subfolder. We have found this works better because it protects the user without chasrging them with the onerous task of checking all the metadata when usually it is correct.
Having said all that we are now seeing many users also using SongKong just to fix a single disc, in this case it would be possible to add an inbuilt review step so we plan to add a single album match task that allows you to review options before changes.
Hi Paul
I tend to use SongKong on individual albums, normally I copy to somewhere safe beforehand
The Scrambles I get are where I try to fix albums extracted from big sets, a practice I am stopping as it causes more issues than it fixes
I didn’t mean to malign SongKong, I use it regularly and it is a superb piece of software, it’s like Roon, it can only work with the data it can find 
Thanks Mike, no you are correct boxsets are a pain.
Firstly its difficult for SongKong to work out if you actually have the boxset, or just a few discs that happen to be on the boxset, and therefore its not always clear if the user would prefer to match the boxset or the original albums.
Then we have the issue that boxsets are large.
Consider the scenario that you want to match ten audio files to a a single album of ten tracks then having found a potential match we check every combination that means checking hundred (10x 10) combinations, i.e file1 may match track1,track, …track 10 , file2 may match track1,track, …track 10and finding the match that allows every track to match well.
Now if you had 100 tracks matching to a 10 disc box set you now check 100 x100 = 10, 000 combinations. That is alot more and thats not even a large box set. With larger box sets the number get very large so we do optimizations to reduce the matching time, but these shortcuts can mean that matching is not quite as robust.
Can I check your songs are already organized one folder per disc, under a single folder representing the boxset, because this would help alot.
My boxes are in 2 sorts
Roon when importing will see CD01 - Brendel Plays Bach differently from CD01 .
If your discs are simply labelled CD01 -> CD99 Roon will see this as a Complete Box and import as such
If you annotate the CD01 - Title etc , Roon sees these as individual albums and splits the box , unfortunately it normally can’t ID the Album because its says it disc 36 not disc 1 you normally have to tell Roon its Disc 1 then it stands a chance
So I have a mix
They are all under the single folder say “Alfred Brendel Complete Philips Recordings”, and then each disc has its own CD01 folder etc with or without a title then tracks within that folder
The history of this is that I used a USB Drive as the Input to my Cambridge Audio CXN before I set up my network properly and the structure was needed to navigate
I am about to comment on this on another thread , i’ll attach it when I’ve done
So its more of a Roon issue than a SongKong one ?
If you do run a boxset against SongKong and its causes problems, but yo can see what it should do just run the Create Support FIles option immediately afterwards. This will upload the latest report plus logs files to the Jthink server and then I can take a more detailed look, and maybe improve it or offer you some ideas on how to use for very best results (note to myself must convert songKong forums to use Discourse like Roon, so much nicer)
I must get round to using songkong, bought it then…
Yes, definitely, thanks. I’ve written you privately. Time to buy and get it to work converting my Naim generated WAV data!
