Converting FLAC to WAV and keeping tags?


Having read about and then experienced an audible difference between FLAC and WAV files it looks like I am going to have to decompress my 4000+ painstakingly organized and tagged albums...

However, the metadata, at least as recognized by foobar, seems to be stripped in conversion to WAV with DBpoweramp--Artist, album, genre etc. fields are blank. Is there any fix for this? What are my options?
abdodson
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