Wave Tagging Woes
This message I recieved from my good friend Frank Reaney – Bright Star Entertainment:
Charles,
I do have a question for you about Tag info. for a .WAV file.
When I rip as an mp3, all my tag info shows up after export. When I rip as a .WAV, only the Title and time show up after export. I am using Itunes on a Mac to import, and all the info appears in the correct window but when I export the .WAV the only thing that stays is the title and time.
My original plan was to rip to .WAV and export to my hdd from Itunes, then use Macmp3gain or other program (Still Researching) to import back to mp3 at a normalized level. I don’t want to have to retype ALL the missing tag info. in again since I thought I was doing that on the rip to .WAV end of the process.
Am I not “getting’ something here? I do want my archive to be in .WAV format, but if I do have to restore from the .WAV HDD, does that mean I have to retype the tag info. again?? I know you are a windows person, but can you reccomend a program for mac that would be better than Itunes, or is it OK and all this crazy tag stuff is just normal regardles of platform used. (Windows or Mac)
I couldn’t find the answer in the book, unless it is somewhere other than Chapter 9.
Thank You in advance for your help. I really appreciate it. Sorry if I am being a pest.
Hi Frank, thanks for the great question!
As with all things in life, there is a trade-off with using a lossless audio file format such as a WAV file. WAV does not support ID tags like MP3s do. FLAC on the other hand supports its own native tagging system – which is similair to the Vorbis tagging system – and is called FLAC Tags or Vorbis Comments. Most FLAC encoders skip adding any sort of ID3 tags to the file because it has caused problems with the playback of the file type in some instances. Essentially, DJ software such as Virtual DJ supporting FLAC means that it should also support the use of FLAC tags, thus eliminating the need for ID3 tags.
FYI: Other types of lossless audio codecs include WMA-lossless, OGG, APE, and so on. This is by no means an exhaustive list, as well you will find that not many of these other file types are as widely supported. Like FLAC, WMA-Lossless also supports its own native tagging system. The down-side to WMA-Lossless is that it requires expensive licensing from Microsoft to include it and is a considerable hassle for programmers as well.
Unfortunately, using the Cortex unit you are very limited in your choices of audio file formats. Other types of controllers such as the Denon HD-2500 give you much more flexability in this regard.
Tags: ape, computer dj, cortex, cps, denon, digital dj, flac, laptop dj, ogg, virtual dj, wav, wma
