--keep-foreign-metadata and EAC. Necessary at all? Options

[Xenion]

I understand what --keep-foreign-metadata does but i wonder if it is necessary at all with WAVE files EAC produces. In my tests restored files previously encoded <without> the --keep-foreign-metadata option have the same checksum as the original EAC-created WAVE file. Is this because my test-CDs just don't contain any foreign metadata or is this switch useless in combination with EAC, because EAC doesn't read any "foreign" metadata at all?

[nu774]

I agreed on pdq, it would not be a useful feature.

RIFF/WAV format can hold many funky chunks you don't even aware of, but if you compress it to FLAC (with --keep-foreign-metadata), there's no way to retrieve information in those chunks other than decompressing it again.
So, if you compress to FLAC and usually work on that, you are saying that you don't need them at all and you only care about it's audio data.

Consider the following scenario.

1. You encode a WAV file containing tags into FLAC using flac --keep-foreign-metadata. WAV tags are stored inside of FLAC, but they are not visible.
2. You edit some tags on the FLAC file. WAV tags kept inside are not touched.
3. You decode it using flac -d --keep-foreign-metadata. Original WAV tags are restored. Your edits on the FLAC tags are not reflected (lost).

Just decoding with a software capable of copying tags from FLAC to WAV would be much better. And if you do so, --keep-foreign-metadata is pointless (at least for LIST and ID3 chunk).