2. pc-audio
  3. 1176955471

Feel let down by your audio software choice?

4 years ago when I started ripping my CD collection to a bunch of WAV files onto my hard drives, I researched the options carefully. I chose MusicMatch, which at the time was consistently one of the best-rated jukebox software. Indeed, I find it continues to organize my collection well, and I love the Audio DJ feature.

Unfortunately, MusicMatch is no longer supported. Supposedly it's going to be integrated with Yahoo's product (which I find much inferior). The alternative, iTunes, I use on my Mac but it, too, lacks some of the features that I would want in a music management software.

And, of course, now I have WAV files that MusicMatch organizes well, but iTunes has a limited ability to read the metadata (tags) in those files, which make them difficult to port over to iTunes. To complicate matters, Slim Devices Squeezebox does not support MusicMatch.

What I really want is a product that allows for easy management of large amount of (potentially uncompressed) music data, that can have pieces of that full collection selectively (and automatically) exported to different "libraries" in a compressed format for synchronization with one or more portable players. Is it that hard for the industry to see that there's a niche for that kind of product?

I just feel let down by the leading software in music management.

Michael
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Showing 3 responses by herman

herman
2,212 posts
 
The reason iTunes can't read the wav tags is that there is no such thing as a wav tag. If there is more information about the song being displayed by your program then it is stored somewhere other than a tag that is part of the wav file.

If you have notes or pictures or other info it has to be in another file that is managed by your program. That's why iTunes can't access it.

It seems unlikely you will find a program that can read and import all the "tag" info that your program has stored unless your program has the ability to export the library in some standard format.

I believe iTunes could do what you want with the compressed files as long you are using iPods. I don't think it supports other players. I'm sure other programs can produce MP3 files but iTunes is what I use so I don't know much about the other ones.
herman
2,212 posts
 
Various programs (MusicMatch included) have ways of tagging WAV files,

I’m sure that is true, but once you tag a wav file in the conventional sense by imbedding the tag information in the file itself then it is no longer a wav file. There is a specific structure to a wav file and imbedding tags corrupts this structure so it is no longer useable by other programs as a wav file. I assume that is what you mean by

they're inconsistent and not well standardized.
herman
2,212 posts
 
Well you learn something new everyday. Everything I've ever read says you can't tag a wav file. Since it is the standard format for consumer audio files you would think there would be a standard for the tags.
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