HydrogenAudio

Hydrogenaudio Forum => General Audio => Topic started by: Metalninja89 on 2012-02-17 21:37:43

Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: Metalninja89 on 2012-02-17 21:37:43
Hey so I am kind of new to using lossless audio especially WAV, and I'm really organized with all my music files I always fix the metadata if it's off and I'll add artwork and lyrics but I cannot seem for the life of me to write that kind of data to WAV files. Is it even possible? I usually use mp3tag pro for mp3's and FLAC's and it works fine for that, can anyone help please?
Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: Prince Of All Saiyans on 2012-02-17 21:40:30
WAV files simply don't have the same tagging capabilities that other formats do. If you've got FLAC, you can always convert to WAV without losing any quality, though most of the tags will be lost.
Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: john33 on 2012-02-17 22:40:25
It is possible to do this by following the rules regarding defining your own "chunks". However, the real problem is that nothing will read it! It will simply be ignored as unrecognised. There are various specialised standards around, particularly in relation to broadcasting, that define and use their own chunks, but they also provide the software to use them. Audition, for example will read and allow editing of the broadcasting "CART" chunks.

So, in all practical senses, I'm afraid it's a 'no go'.
Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: LordWarlock on 2012-02-17 23:09:31
foobar supports this.
Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: pdq on 2012-02-18 03:31:45
dBpoweramp can read and write wav tags.
Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: kwanbis on 2012-02-18 05:12:56
I always fix the metadata if it's off and I'll add artwork and lyrics but I cannot seem for the life of me to write that kind of data to WAV files.

Sorry, why would you use WAV over FLAC? Is it because of some software/hardware requirement?
Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: Metalninja89 on 2012-02-18 22:13:02
I always fix the metadata if it's off and I'll add artwork and lyrics but I cannot seem for the life of me to write that kind of data to WAV files.

Sorry, why would you use WAV over FLAC? Is it because of some software/hardware requirement?


Well maybe I can clarify this here, because I thought that even though both WAV and FLAC are considered to be lossless audio I thought that WAV was kind of like the best for lossless formats considering the bit rate is always a bit higher than FLAC files.
Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: saratoga on 2012-02-18 22:30:23
Well maybe I can clarify this here, because I thought that even though both WAV and FLAC are considered to be lossless audio I thought that WAV was kind of like the best for lossless formats considering the bit rate is always a bit higher than FLAC files.


All lossless copies of something must be identical, therefore it is impossible for one to be "better". 

Generally though lossless formats try to make the bitrate as low as possible, since that reduces the amount of disk space required to store the file.
Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: kwanbis on 2012-02-18 23:58:51
Well maybe I can clarify this here, because I thought that even though both WAV and FLAC are considered to be lossless audio I thought that WAV was kind of like the best for lossless formats considering the bit rate is always a bit higher than FLAC files.

Lossless is lossless. So WAV is no better, sound wise, than FLAC. Think as FLAC as RAR/ZIP for audio. Use FLAC.
Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: Kohlrabi on 2012-02-19 01:18:01
I thought that WAV was kind of like the best for lossless formats considering the bit rate is always a bit higher than FLAC files.

Bit rate is a measure of filesize per second of audio. Hence, for lossless encodes you'd want to choose the encoder producing encodes with the smallest bit rate. There is some correlation of increasing perceived audio quality with increasing bit rate for lossy encoding, when comparing encodes made by the same encoder. To use bit rate as quality metric across multiple lossy formats is invalid.

Title: Writing Metadata to WAV files
Post by: trout on 2012-02-19 03:43:54
[...] the bit rate is always a bit higher than FLAC files.

If you compress a WAV file with FLAC, the FLAC file can be decompressed back to a WAV file and the result will be 100% identical to the original. It is not just "perceptually" the same, but exactly bit-for-bit the same. Likewise, when you play a FLAC file, the decoded audio output is identical to that of the original WAV / PCM / CD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless)