Where's my WAV metadata?

[grassrootsLA]

Any ideas on why metadata for my WAV tracks do not translate to the controller?

When I index my library, metadata for new AAC and MPEG files show up fine. WAV files only show up on the "Track" list, and the song name is preceded by the track #. Won't show up in Albums, artists, etc.

The metadata for the WAV files all show up fine in ITunes 4.7

OS 10.3.7

Thanks

[gbdesai]

As far as I know, WAV files don't have built-in tagging support of any type. iTunes probably maintains the info in the iTunes database alone.

[David - Sonos]

WAV files do not support ID3v2 tags. They use what is called a RIFF header and you can add some data chunks to the header, usually just the Artist Name and Song Name. Third-party software such as AT File Mole allows you to add data chunks to the RIFF header on the WAV file.

-Dave

[PaulC]

I had the same problem and made the wrong assumtion in another post that it was related to iTunes. But now I know what's going on.

Thanks

[DonRomani]

Have been having the same problem trying to create tags for wav files. Have just found that Media Monkey (A free download) will create the riff headers needed. It works as a really nice masstagger and file renamer. Have used AT File Mole to examine these headers and they seem fine but am still waiting for my Sonos to be delivered so don't know whether it actually solves the problem. Would really like to know from someone whether this works or not.

[Majik]

Don,
WAV really isn't the best format to store music in. If you want high quality you should really consider a lossless format which supports tags.

Roughly speaking, your choices are:

FLAC - Widespread support (noteable exceptions being WMP and iTunes)

AIFF - Medium support, works with iTunes

WMA lossless - Niche, badly supported (WMP only) doesn't work with Sonos. Avoid!

Apple Lossless - Like WMA lossless, but only supported by iTunes.

All of these formats are lossless and give the same quality as WAV but with better tag support and less storage requirements (about 50% of WAV).

Cheers,

Keith

[DonRomani]

Thanks or the advice Majik, but I just don't see why I should have to compress my music collection. I've tried every audio codec going and none of them are lossless whatever they can prove mathematically. Any compression destroys the stereo sound field and although can provide good results over some systems the difference on my Hi-Fi is very noticable. What's the point of reducing my storage requirements by 50% when disk sizes double every year, seems like a sollution to a short term problem.

[Majik]

Don,
This is just wrong. Compression can be lossless or lossy. Flac is lossless.

The means that when uncompressed the resulting output file is the same as the one that created it.

Exactly the same.

No differences.

Not even a bit here or there.

Exactly the same.

If you think otherwise then you are just plain wrong. Forget maths, it's easy to prove this:
For our demonstration we will take one, freshly-ripped, WAV file.... test.wav

(This is, in fact, Oasis - The Importance Of being Idle and is 39130268 bytes long):

We will first convert this to a lossless FLAC format... test.flac

We will then decompress test.flac back to a second file... test2.wav

We now have two files which (if FLAC is lossless) are identical. We can test this using the diff tool which outputs the differences betwen two files.

The following command line performs all of these tasks (and counts the number of differences output):

echo "Differences found: "; flac -sf test.wav; flac -sdf test.flac -o test2.wav; diff -q test.wav test2.wav|wc -l

The results are as follows:
# echo "Differences found: "; flac -sf test.wav; flac -sdf test.flac -o test2.wav; diff -q test.wav test2.wav|wc -l
Differences found:
0

Conclusion: The files are absolutely identical

If you think you can tell the difference between these files by listening to them then, quite frankly, you are imagining it.

Compressing your files with a suitable lossless encoder will not degrade them in any way, shape or form, and yields benefits in terms of disk storage savings and better tagging support.

Keith

[DonRomani]

Fair enough, have run a similar test in EAC and FLAC does produce and exact copy of the original. Still my preference would always be just to leave the file alone, it annoys me that what is the most standard of audio files is so hard to use in these systems. I solved the tagging issue with MediaMonkey but there is defenitly no way of adding ReplayGain info to wavs. The only way to level a playlist would be to normalize every track, and I'm certainly loathed to do that. So it looks like I'll be converting to FLAC afterall. Thanks for your input.

Don Romani

[Majik]

Don,
I was a bit concerned that I had been a little harsh on this, and might have upset you. Clearly you are a sensible bloke (as we say in the UK) and have taken this in they way it was intended.

I agree with you to a certain extent. Clearly ripping to WAV is pretty trivial, and should be well supported by definition, but the problem was WAV was not (originally) designed to be a format for digital music, but more as a general audio digitising format. Clearly it does this well, but lack the tagging (and hence, the tagging support) that formats like MP3 and FLAC (which were designed for digital music) have.

Having said this, Sonos stands out as one of the few manufactuerers that supports WAV reasonably well.

I'm sure you know all this and I'm teching you to suck eggs, for that I apologise.

The trouble is manufacturers like Sony, Microsoft, and Apple, feel the need to invent their own proprietary music formats in order to restrict your choice and lock you in. This means that even these "well supported" formats, like FLAC, are articficually more difficult to deal with for the average user.

I reckon there's going to be chaos on the digital music industry for a few years until this comes to a head, one way or another.

In the meantime, I highly recommend FLAC as a way to go with Sonos. I have found the quality to be excellent.

In fact, from a quality point of view, theres a good reason why FLAC might be better than WAV:

Part of the equation is how well the audio stream reaches the Zoneplayer. If the stream is interrupted or delayed significantly, this will result in degredation. The most likely cause of this is network problems like congestion or wireless drop-outs.

If you are using WAV files, these take twice the bandwidth and aremore likely to suffer from networkm congestion issues as an equivalent FLAC file.

Obviously, the best way is to have all the ZP's wired with 100M switched ethernet, but this isn't always practical


Cheers,

Keith