On the one hand, I can understand this, as the lossless format of FLACs achieved with a smaller file size than WAVs would indicate some kind of encrypting. WAVers say that FLAC music doesn’t sound as good. Until I began Googling as a result of this controversy being raised for me because of another post, I was ignorant of the vitriol that exists between the two groups. I have no emotional commitment to WAV unlike, it seems, FLACers have to FLACS. I am simply trying to realize the truth among all the back and forth. I may want to convert my lowly 300+ albums to FLAC. Whether there is a governing committee (as FLACers seem to imply for FLAC files) for WAV files or not, there seems to be at least a casual agreement about what and where tags and, for that matter, cover art should be incorporated into the actual files.ĭon’t misunderstand, I don’t want to further beat a dead horse or to be snarky. The truth is that the basic tags that one would expect are in WAV files. So all that stuff by the FLACers about the unreliability of WAV tags, as a reason to prefer FLACs over WAVs, is a bit of a straw man. Customized tags are in truth only guaranteed to be readable by the originating program. In the photo metadata world, there’s been a transition from the IPTC IIM tags to tags based on XMP, which has provided a firm basis for an extensible system that is far more future-proof than what we seem to be confronted with in the audio world.Īh, you see this is my point. It seems to me that, to use an analogy, the ID3 tags are the QWERTY of the audio metadata world - we are constrained by history, and it’s problematic to throw it all out and start again with a properly designed system.

For custom tags created by dbPoweramp and the like, they may exist as custom tags within file metadata, but there’s no guarantee that they will be read and acted upon by other applications. I can’t say what the case is for JRiver - I’ve never found it an application that I would want to use. In the case of Roon, then all metadata that is created exists only within the Roon database, it is never written back into the files as file metadata.

I understand that if one creates a special tagged field under JRiver, for example, then that tag is carried only on JRivers library, of course, but isn’t that case true for any file format? The user tags that are created in Roon, and even on FLACs, don’t those particular tags exist only in Roon?

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