I tried out converting one track as I was considering converting my mp3s and m4a's to Aiff to make them properly Ableton compatible and save disc space but noticed when I did so the embedded album art disappeared and tags. There is no way on this earth I'm every re-tagging / renaming / re-arting my collection (I just finished and it was incredibly tedious and painful). Is there any way to do this? I'm using XLD on OSX.
I would also like some software to batch normalize my lossy and lossless audio files quickly and conveniently without my mp3 files being rewritten and therefore transcoded. OSX preferred - Windows OK.
Thanks
Converting your files to AIFF won't save disk space. AIFF is uncompressed PCM audio, and files are much larger than their MP3 equivalent.
I don't know about OSX, but on Windows foobar2000 will convert files between formats and retain all tags apart from album art. I believe that, again on Windows, dBPoweramp will convert and retain all tags including album art.
Replay Gain will normalise your files without rewriting the data (but obviously the results only work on a Replay Gain aware player - on a non-RG aware player the file volume is unchanged). I don't know about OSX, but on Windows foobar2000 will scan and apply RG tags to your music.
I thought Ableton Live supported M4A/AAC?
Anyway, converting lossy to lossless/uncompressed is still transcoding, which you said you want to avoid—and (as has been said) a waste of space, to boot.
Besides, do m/any applications support metadata in AIFF files? I know the format supports ID3v2 tags but not whether these are read by most programs. (Of course, I welcome any clarification.)
Since you made another thread for your questions about normalisation, please confine discussion of that process to that thread.
I don't know about OSX, but on Windows foobar2000 will convert files between formats and retain all tags apart from album art.
foobar2000 does support tags in WAV files but not in AIFF.
iTunes reads id3v2 from AIFF.