I've been tagging my audio files. They are mostly flac, and the rest WMA lossless. I find the FLAC files often take absolutely ages to tag. Whereas the WMA lossless are tagged pretty much instantly, as one would expect. Is this a foobar problem or a problem with the FLAC file format? (NB not using the recent version of foobar yet.)

well unless the flac files have a certain # of kb "padding" (blank space reserved for the tag), it will take a good while

The tags are written at the beginning of the file, so when you update the tag it re-writes the enitre file to the hard drive

Not sure if FLAC supports padding though, but if it does...padding the files when you first encode them would make things much quicker

If I'm wrong about the whole thig someone let me know

The reference encoder supports 4KB of padding by default.

small addition to rudefyet's explanation: your tagging application must also handle padding properly. foobar2000 0.9 do it perfectly whereas 0.83 didn't (it used to rewrite the file even with padded files...).

Perhaps slightly besides the topic, but i've found that the default 4KB of padding is often not enough when working with CD images. I would create a flac with built-in cuesheet, then load the flac into foobar and use the freedb function to tag all the tracks. Frequently it would rewrite the whole thing. -P 8192 has only given me the problem on one CD (a 21 track various artists worst case scenario ).

Thanks for the info. I'll get the latest foobar and see if that helps. Unfortunately my encoder (Plextools) doesn't have any options except compression ratio. Hopefully it uses what kjoonlee says is default. I wonder what wise guy had the idea of putting tags at the start of the file.

Now wma tagging is not supported in the new foobar. Great.

And FLAC tagging still takes ages.
At least it's only once. I've made foobar put the tags at the end when it retags. Hopefully there won't be compatibility issues later.

And where did you find an option to put tags at the end of FLAC files?

I've seen an answer to this before.

For lossy files this is a nifty way of allowing you to access a streaming file's metadata right at the very start of the stream.

If the files were encoded with the 1.04 version of the encoder (or anything prior to 1.1, which came out in January 2003), the 4 kb of padding will not be there and tagging will be very slow.

I THINK this is what I've got it to do now. I've specified in "advanced options" "force tagging scheme on all files" APE+ID3 v1. Both of these formats go at the end.

At any rate retagging the first time takes a very long time. But after the first retag it is fast. Before I checked this option I don't think this was the case.

The setting you've changed has no impact on FLAC tagging (it's placed under "MP3" for a reason), and the difference you're experiencing is either placebo or windows cache or FLAC padding actually kicking in.

This sounds very much like what I experienced when I came across some files that had been made using version 1.04. Once I had tagged them, it had the padding and changes to the tags happened very quickly, but the first time it tagged them, it needed to rewrite the entire file.

Also, I believe it is not a very good idea to put an ID3 tag on a flac file. I know there were some threads on this a year or two back.

OK, thanks for the information.