hi,
when i have my new harddisk(s) i want to re-rip my whole cd collection and alot of cds i get from friends. one of my friend's dad has over 5000 cds and i want to rip about ~1000 of them.
of course i want to use a lossless codec but i can't really decide which one and i'm also afraid of bugs in the codecs themselves that could cause damaged files. so i simply decided to use WAVE :-). storage isn't that expensive these days and i already have a lot of free space for my collection...
another advantage is that i don't have to decode all my files first when i want to convert them to vorbis (if i ever get a hardware vorbis player)
is there a way to use ape2 tags in wav files (does foobar read them afterwards, btw?)

edit: hehe ok works with --nocheck --force ape2 and foobar also reads them

but anyway is it recommended to do this or does this damage the wav files?

It shouldn't do any damage, perhaps some poorly-written players will read apev2 tag data as garbage at the end of track.

Many Microsoft programs will not touch the wave if you tak data to the end.

well no problem for me as i only use foobar B)
i hope vorbis/musepack/lame encoders dont have problems with the data garbage at the end too. i will simply test it or does anybody has any information on that?

You can use foobar2000's diskwriter to encode vorbis/musepack/lame.

next question: is there a replaygain available for wav that only writes tags just like vorbisgain so it doesn't modify the audiodata itself?

Sounds like you all you need is optional apev2 writer in fb2k wav input (which I can easily add for next beta).

YES! i'd love to see this in the next beta
is it possible to make foobar use tags like

REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK = 1.09383690
REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN = -8.28 dB

or does this require massive changes in the wave input thing ?

If you somehow manage to get REPLAYGAIN_* values to apev2 tags in your wav files, it should read them as RG info already; there's just no way to write them from fb2k at the moment (but adding it is just a matter of editing a few lines).

wow this really works! great! well, just foobar B)

http://www.on-air.info/toocool.png

If you can make the thing look like a genuine RIFF chuck, then adding extra data doesn't break the .wav format.

If you just dump it at the end without putting it into a valid chuck, then obviously it does break the format, and it's a bad idea, even if some players accept it.

Cheers,
David.

Yes, this is evil, but at least it's less wrong than eg. id3v2 tags put at the beginning of file.
Also, programs that care about RIFF chunks shouldn't read past main RIFF chunk, and apev2 tag is outside it.

Actually I came across an antiquainted RIFF tag standard (I will implement it when I get a chance):

IART Artist
IGNR Genre
INAM Title
IPRD Album
itrk Track Number

http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/kb_ftp/1166005.asp

I had my own RIFF tag reader/writer ages ago (in_midi, RMI files). That standard pretty sucks, no custom field types, no unicode, etc.

Yeah, CoolEdit also reads and writes those RIFF tags, and also uses them for storing cue points and playlists and you can even put an image in there...