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Topic: Accurate method/tool for dealing with WMA (Lossless) metadata tagging/album art? (Read 4822 times) previous topic - next topic
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Accurate method/tool for dealing with WMA (Lossless) metadata tagging/album art?

Subject TL;DR here.

The issue is that I am working with WMA Lossless files for use in my car (Ford with Sync/MyFord Touch. It will happily handle WMA Lossless up to the full 24 bit/96 khz limit of the format) and so far my conversion process is fine. FLAC source files and conversion done via dbPoweramp with the verify option enabled.

The issue comes when trying to manage the metadata in these files as nothing seems to 100% agree with each other. Usually I'll flip between using WMP12 (mostly for the built in volume levelling support and assuming it is going to be a 'legal' tag that should be picked up by Sync and applied properly, though I've began using the built in album info tools for mainstream content) and MediaMonkey.

What has happened most recently is I had turned on the 'Overwrite all media information' option in WMP12 on a whim and some non-mainstream albums had mildly incorrect metadata at best applied. However jumping back to MediaMonkey even after wiping the library and re-importing it looked like none of the data changed from where it was prior. Additionally moving those files over to the car it seemed to agree with what MediaMonkey was displaying. However back to WMP12 again and it is showing what it had applied that was incorrect.

My question is for anyone who is more intimately familiar with the WMA format: Are there any recommended software tools out there that will best be able to handle tagging WMA files to whatever spec it is designed with in this area? I'm not exactly sure what happened with the situation above and the inconsistencies between software but if I can find something that will avoid that it'd be awesome. So far between of WMP12 and MediaMonkey something screwy is going on and I'm not sure which one to trust.

 

Re: Accurate method/tool for dealing with WMA (Lossless) metadata tagging/album art?

Reply #1
WMP12 defaults to not actually tagging any of your files, but using a database instead.

Re: Accurate method/tool for dealing with WMA (Lossless) metadata tagging/album art?

Reply #2
WMP12 defaults to not actually tagging any of your files, but using a database instead.

Thank you! Seems a bit backwards to have it default to NOT writing tag updates to the files which may be used elsewhere. I did find the setting in the options to turn on writing back to the files.

Now I just need to get back to finding a solid metadata source plugin for MediaMonkey since they dropped Amazon support out of the box. And see how accurate their tag support is for WMA files especially in the Album art area. That always seemed to be hit or miss even with MM. Thankfully it is only for a small handful of non-mainstream tracks. My intent is to use WMP for the mainstream stuff for as long as I am able as their tag sourcing seems to be very accurate and complete with clean Album art.

All that unless someone has a recommendation for another program that can tag WMA files correctly.

Re: Accurate method/tool for dealing with WMA (Lossless) metadata tagging/album art?

Reply #3
Have you tried using Mp3tag?

Re: Accurate method/tool for dealing with WMA (Lossless) metadata tagging/album art?

Reply #4
I have seen Mp3tag come up a number of times but didn't realize WMA was in its stable of supported formats. Will definitely be giving it a look.  :)

Re: Accurate method/tool for dealing with WMA (Lossless) metadata tagging/album art?

Reply #5
You said you use dbPoweramp. I've always liked the results of the tag editor that comes with that. I suppose it's not the most user friendly though.
Processed audio in java and python.