Converting FLAC to WAV and keeping tags?

I'm not an expert on this but I do have some experience. FLAC is very good for tagging (metadata). I know that WAV format doesn't have all of the tagging features of FLAC. Its a very common problem that people have when working with WAV music files. If you are looking for a really technical answer on how the 2 formats deal with tags, I'm not the one to ask. My experiance with this is just from being an end user and having the same problems myself.

I can give you some info that may make all of this a little easier. You will probably have to re tag, most, if not all of your music. One thing that many people run into is confusing metadata (tags) with folders and file names. For example, if you go into explorer and change the folder name of an album name because it is not correct, you won't see the changes in your music library. In order to see it in your library, you would need to edit the tags for that album as well.

To save a lot of time, I'd recommend mass tagging. It can save you a lot of time. To do this you need to organize your music in your file manager first. Start with a master folder for all of your music and inside that create a folder for each genre. Inside the genre folder put artist names and inside artist names, put the albums. Once you have all of that done, you can go into a music player or tagger, do a file system view and tag from there. For example, if you have 1000 albums in your jazz folder, select the jazz folder and tag everything in it to jazz under the genre tag. You may have to still do some manual, single tagging, but the more you can get done with mass tagging, the more time you will save.

You can use Foobar for this. I recommend another free music player/tagger, as well. Its called Quod Libet. For tagging, I like it the best even though I don't use it for my main media player.

Not to be rude, but your claim of hearing an audible difference between FLAC and WAV is utter nonsense. Spend some time learning about audio file formats and compression types and you'll understand why.

Lupinethe3rd - their is a small but vocal group who steadfastly believes they hear a difference. Steve Nugent (Empirical Audio) is one of the leaders. It is kind of like arguing about power cables or various tweaks. Some people swear they hear a difference, others dismiss the claims. Did you read the 4 part series in TAS? They claimed to hear differences in bit identical files after copying them from one format to another. I just want you to know that this is a very active topic of discussion and just saying it cannot happen is not going to convince this crowd.

Lupin-

I understand that FlAC and WAV contain the same data. I do believe the difference is thought to come from imperfect decompression of FLAC on the fly by the CPU. As a psychologist by trade, I have no doubt the difference I'm "hearing" could be illusory. Never the less...

Zd -

Thanks for your input. I was afraid it would require mass re-tagging. I'll take a look at Quod.

Andrew

I just stuck to AIFF which supports meta data and is uncompressed lossless.

Some have had good results with FLAC set at 0 compression.

WAV does support meta data now IIRC but getting the software that supports it seems to be difficult.

"As a psychologist by trade, I have no doubt the difference I'm "hearing" could be illusory. Never the less..."

Andrew,

Its just my opinion/advice, but don't doubt yourself. Currently, there are a lot of people getting into audio by way of computer. When they find websites like this and look at what were talking about and buying, quite often their shocked because they are seeing high end audio for the first time. Most people aren't even aware that audio like this even exist. As a result of this, many new people try to "talk sense" to audiophiles. (I should mention that I have no idea if Lupinthe3rd is one of these people. I'm just talking in general.). Thats why I say don't doubt yourself. Who better to judge your system than you?

There seems to be 2 groups: those that say FLAC sounds better than WAV and those who say they hear no difference. But I find it somewhat interesting that virtually no one is saying that WAV sounds better than FLAC - as if most people were in agreement with that part.

you shall of course need to ensure that your digital signal cables are optimised for the format that you ultimately select otherwise you will not reap the full benefits of the conversion.

Actually it's either they hear no difference at all or WAV sounds better.

No offence at all to Ivan, but I think that Doggiehowser is right on that. Most people who do hear a difference like WAV better. I'm not saying they are right, but that its just seems to be popular opinion. For myself, I haven't done enough serious listening to have a solid opinion yet.

Interesting, will try keeping an open mind on that.

Ivan,

I wasn't trying to push that info on you in any way, I was just going by what seems to me, is popular opinion. Nothing more. I also forgot to mention one other format. Apple lossless. A lot of people seem to really like that one as well. If you are using iTunes for a player, it would make sense to give it a try. I don't know if any other players support it, though. For me its not an option because I use Linux.

AIFF is fairly universal. Like WAV, it is derived from an old Amiga IFF format and stores the data in lossless uncompressed.

Doggiehowser is correct on both posts. I've preferred WAV, but do not want to deal with the tagging issues. I use mostly AIFF, while keeping some WAVs.

AIFF for me too. While I haven't done any head-to-head comparisons, these days storage is so cheap that I prefer to stick to an uncompressed format - and of course AIFF doesn't have the tagging problems of WAV.

On one of my back-up drives I keep all of my downloaded music (HDTracks, Qobuz etc) in FLAC format to save time and space Essentially I download in FLAC format, transfer the FLACs to a back-up drive, and convert the FLACs to AIFF for my primary drive.

I don't have enough time or patience to compare the two formats and don't really trust such testing anyways. I just reason that if fidelity is the ultimate goal, there is absolutely no advantage to unzipping during playback.