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Topic: Foobar writes non-standard APEv2 tags to my WavPack files (Read 1583 times) previous topic - next topic
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Foobar writes non-standard APEv2 tags to my WavPack files

Problem: when loading WavPack files, all tagged by foobar, into another audio player on my secondary machine, in this case Deadbeef (because Linux), the tags from the WavPack files aren't loaded properly, or so it seems.

Things like artist and title carry over well, but year, tracknumber and total tracks do not. It appears foobar does not adhere to the APEv2 standards when writing tags.

When I look at the APE keys here: https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=APE_key , I see for example that according to the APE specification, the year should be put in the tags as key YEAR, but foobar writes under key DATE. Similarly, APE tags require TRACK for the tracknumber, but foobar writes under TRACKNUMBER. Furthermore it uses a separate TOTALTRACKS while APE requires it to be written in TRACK as ##/##. Naturally another program which can read APEv2 tags and expects them to follow the APEv2 specification, does not display these correctly. Deadbeef can see these non-standard tags as custom fields but does not display the tracknumber in the corresponding column. I assume that other software will have this same problem.

What to do? As far as I know foobar does not have an option to write standards-compliant APEv2 tags. What was the reason for this choice? Is it on purpose or by accident? A bug? This makes it very difficult to use a WavPack collection with different audio software.


Re: Foobar writes non-standard APEv2 tags to my WavPack files

Reply #2
Indeed that looks good.

Here is my example:
https://imgur.com/a/FjqaU5p

It is a compressed DSD file which originally had a ID3 tag.
Maybe it is a bug in the Wavpack encoder, when it encodes a (DSD?) file with ID3 tag, it copies the key names from the ID3 file instead of translating them to the proper APE keys.

After I edited the tags again with foobar, foobar wrote the correct keys.

I must apologize that I blamed foobar, it appears to be not at fault. I will do some further tests and perhaps report it to the WavPack creator. Thank you for your help in any case!

Re: Foobar writes non-standard APEv2 tags to my WavPack files

Reply #3
I have corrected the issue by simply adding an extra custom tag to all my WavPack files at once, thereby letting foobar rewriting all tags, and then removing that tag again. Problem solved, APE tags are now written according to spec!

Re: Foobar writes non-standard APEv2 tags to my WavPack files

Reply #4
If there is/was album art, bringing the metadata above 1 MB, you would have to use wavpack with --allow-huge-tags in addition to --import-id3. WavPack does not (yet) convert from ID3v2.4 which some DSD files use,  so maybe it is easier to just open both the DSD and the .wv in Mp3tag and copy - that will work whether it is 2.3 or 2.4.

Note that foobar2000 - and most (?) other players - will display certain tags different than they are written in the literal file. You probably have seen the ID3 "POPM" displayed to you as "RATING" rather than "POPULARIMETER".

 

Re: Foobar writes non-standard APEv2 tags to my WavPack files

Reply #5
I think I must have used --import-id3 in the past, when compressing from .dsf to WavPack, and something went wrong with translating the tags to APEv2 there, but I cannot reproduce it anymore in Wavpack 5.4.0. If I compress a .dsf file with an ID3 tag now, using --import-id3, the APEv2 tag keys are used correctly by the WavPack compressor. Perhaps it was a bug that has been fixed long ago, and I only found out after recently having imported the files into Deadbeef.

Re: Foobar writes non-standard APEv2 tags to my WavPack files

Reply #6
@bryant / @peter There appears to be an issue with importing tags from DSF/DSDIFF files and foobar retagging them?

Re: Foobar writes non-standard APEv2 tags to my WavPack files

Reply #7
Actually, retagging them with foobar 1.6.9 solved the issue. Compressing the .dsf files again, which have id3 tags, with WavPack 5.4.0 could also not reproduce the error. I think there is currently no issue.
Fact is that I had a whole bunch of albums, converted in the past from .dsf with id3 tags to WavPack with APEv2 tags, which used the wrong APE keys. They were originally tagged by an older version of foobar, I think.

Re: Foobar writes non-standard APEv2 tags to my WavPack files

Reply #8
The issue here is that you probably used the wrong ID3 tags when ripping. You need to make sure to use ID3v2.3 tags, NOT ID3v2.4. This is set in sacd_extract.cfg with

id3tag=1 ; (or =1, =2, =3, =4, =5)   at DSF conversion the ID3 tags will be created:
           ; -(id3tag=1) in ID3V2.3 version with full metadata. String encodings is UTF-16 with BOM (UCS-2);

If you do this, then batchencoder will carry all tags over to WAVPACK in APEv2 format - with the correct command-line options, which in my case are:

wavpack -d -h --import-id3 --allow-huge-tags -m -t -x

Re: Foobar writes non-standard APEv2 tags to my WavPack files

Reply #9
Thanks, that might have very well been the problem, as I made a habit of using 2.4 for mp3s back then.