WAV or WAVE (Waveform Audio File Format): Audio file format for Windows developed by Microsoft and IBM.
WAV appeals to the audiophile mind, probably because if you rip a CD to WAV the result is as close as you can get to the CD-format (uncompressed 16 bits / 44.1 kHz PCM audio).
In your audiophile fervor, you rip all your CD's to WAV.
One day you tried another player or you move the files to a new computer and find out that album title, song title, art work, all the meta data you provided are gone.
All those hours you spend meticulously adding the right information are wasted.
This is the paradox of WAV, the support for the music part is almost universal, the support of tagging almost nonexistent.
Due to all these technical problems a lot of people believe that it is impossible to tag WAV. This is not true, it's a matter of writing the tags in the info chunk.
Due to a lack of standards, portability is very low.
If you decide to go for WAV you can use the following strategies:
Don't tag, use a well defined file structure to browse your collection.
You need meaningful file names.
Use a fixed name convention like track/composer/album/opus/song/year/performer.
Some player software can populate their library by parsing the file name and the reverse, renaming the file using the information in the library.
Maybe they can stomach something like this:
1_Franz Schubert _Schubert: Lieder, Vol. 2 (Box Set)_D. 699_Der entsühnte Orest ("Zu meinen Füssen brichst du dich"), song for voice & piano _1820_Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau / Gerald Moore
Beware of the 256 byte limit for the length of path/filename.
Beware of special characters, if you transfer from Win to Linux (NAS) some special characters gives problems.
Moving library and audio.
As most media players allows you to enter all kind of information but stores this in the library (database) only and not in the audio, a possible but risky scenario is to move both library and the audio files to another PC.
Both library and audio has to be in the same location on the new machine.
However, the moment you want to use another media player, all information is lost.
Media players supporting tagging WAV
J River Media Center, dbPoweramp, Foobar write or can read tags in WAV.
They probably write ID3 style tags.
Again, when moving to another player you run the risk of losing all information.
Don't tag but use a cue sheet
A CUE sheet is a seperate text file describing the content of the audio file
Don't use WAV but use a lossless format which supports tagging.
If in doubt if this would compromise sound quality, do a ABX comparison between WAV and its lossless alternative.
Don't forget, lossless is lossless, given the right software you don't tie your hands, you can always convert to another lossless format without compromising sound quality.
WAV appeals to the audiophile mind, probably because if you rip a CD to WAV the result is as close as you can get to the CD-format (uncompressed 16 bits / 44.1 kHz PCM audio).
In your audiophile fervor, you rip all your CD's to WAV.
One day you tried another player or you move the files to a new computer and find out that album title, song title, art work, all the meta data you provided are gone.
All those hours you spend meticulously adding the right information are wasted.
This is the paradox of WAV, the support for the music part is almost universal, the support of tagging almost nonexistent.
Due to all these technical problems a lot of people believe that it is impossible to tag WAV. This is not true, it's a matter of writing the tags in the info chunk.
Due to a lack of standards, portability is very low.
If you decide to go for WAV you can use the following strategies:
Don't tag, use a well defined file structure to browse your collection.
You need meaningful file names.
Use a fixed name convention like track/composer/album/opus/song/year/performer.
Some player software can populate their library by parsing the file name and the reverse, renaming the file using the information in the library.
Maybe they can stomach something like this:
1_Franz Schubert _Schubert: Lieder, Vol. 2 (Box Set)_D. 699_Der entsühnte Orest ("Zu meinen Füssen brichst du dich"), song for voice & piano _1820_Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau / Gerald Moore
Beware of the 256 byte limit for the length of path/filename.
Beware of special characters, if you transfer from Win to Linux (NAS) some special characters gives problems.
Moving library and audio.
As most media players allows you to enter all kind of information but stores this in the library (database) only and not in the audio, a possible but risky scenario is to move both library and the audio files to another PC.
Both library and audio has to be in the same location on the new machine.
However, the moment you want to use another media player, all information is lost.
Media players supporting tagging WAV
J River Media Center, dbPoweramp, Foobar write or can read tags in WAV.
They probably write ID3 style tags.
Again, when moving to another player you run the risk of losing all information.
Don't tag but use a cue sheet
A CUE sheet is a seperate text file describing the content of the audio file
Don't use WAV but use a lossless format which supports tagging.
If in doubt if this would compromise sound quality, do a ABX comparison between WAV and its lossless alternative.
Don't forget, lossless is lossless, given the right software you don't tie your hands, you can always convert to another lossless format without compromising sound quality.
