I hate asking questions, as much as I do asking for driving for directions; but after google-ing for a week, I give up.

Is there a commandline program for tagging AIFF files? I understand that Itunes does this (with ID3v1?). Is this even a standardized format?

P.S. no need to preach about the uselessness of AIFF. I've been trolling on this forum for years and am also a flac/lame/eac/foobar convert

AIFF is the industry standard format and is used in almost all pro-audio applications and by hardware like samplers, recorders, and DAWs - far from useless, it's the de-facto standard. BWF, however, might take over soon.

Anyway, AIFF (and BWF, the standardized WAVE subset) are all RIFF-based formats and can use the standard professional RIFF tag chunks. You can have many different chunk types in RIFF files. Common in professional fields, an 'iXML' chunk will contain additional metadata, while more standard tags are stored in their own standardized chunks - 'NAME', 'AUTH', '© ', 'ANNO', 'COMT'. You could probably map these to "Title", "Artist", "Year", "Album", and "Comments" if you want to use AIFF/AIFC for ripping albums. There are other chunks used only by MIDI samplers, and a myriad of application-specific chunks.

In the consumer realm, a RIFF chunk 'ID3 ' is created which just contains an ID3 frame. This should be an ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4 frame stored inside the chunk.

At this point, I'm not sure of any Windows application software that works with any of these files.

Almost all professional products will (Pyramix, Samplitude, etc.) and almost all of the Macintosh products common in production work will support all of these formats as well. Outside of software for the studio market, you are probably out of luck.

I hope that foobar2000 might support these industry standard professional formats in the future (AIFF RIFF tags, BWF, DDP, AIFF 'ID3 ' chunks, etc).

iTunes supports the consumer 'ID3 ' chunk tagging of AIFF - but not the more professional chunk types. This is interesting, since the RIFF chunk tags are used for sorting/naming/classification in Apple's Professional products including Logic Pro, Soundtrack, and even Garageband and Apple Loops.

Edit: (off-topic but interesting) - As far as lossless compression goes, WavPack looks to be the winner for formats like BWF and AIFF, since it supports lossless compression of RIFF chunks. Hopefully AIFF input will be supported by WavPack in the future.

Well, I think all it would take is someone knowledgeable about AIFF - like you - to discuss it with Bryant.

I guess AIFF isn't supported in WavPack yet because noone asked. RIFF chunks weren't supported either, until someone interested in them contacted David.

>I guess AIFF isn't supported in WavPack yet because noone asked. RIFF chunks weren't
>supported either, until someone interested in them contacted David.

In a simpler world Wavpack does not need to know about the chunks, if it encounters any in a file which are not known (ie the format) it should save as is, no cleverness, a chunk is just that a block of data.

The real issues come if converting a tagged AIFF file to wavpack, then to some other format such as ogg, those tags should be read by the compressor and not stored as a chunk but as ID tags so they can be read and used later.

It appears that libaudiofile (LGPL) contains what would be necessary to read the chunks. Of course, certain chunk types will need additional parsing (such as iXML).

Unfortunately, the textual chunks are defined as "pure ASCII" by the specifications. I'd be very suprised if this hasn't been abused storing extended characters using the local system code page, thus, an ID3v2 tag (using Unicode) in an 'ID3 ' chunk might be a better tagging solution for some.

However, there is nothing stopping anyone from using application specific or new chunk types. These could easily be specificed to hold ReplayGain values, etc.

Edit: Nothing is stopping anyone from using an APEv2 tag in some "APE2" kind of chunk either. Or... all of the above. Some best practices would have to be put forth to prevent another tagging mess like MP3. BWF-complaint tags would be a good start for WAVE data where applicable since it's an existing documented standard. Using the ASCII AIFF tags as specificed, possibly overriding with ID3 data if the 'ID3 ' chunk is present (similar to ID3v1+v2 solution) could be an option. However, the AIFF/RIFF chunk types are not always compatible with the ID3 field types...