Hi everyone, I used to have all my CDs digitally backed up to 320kbps CBR Joint-Stereo MP3 with the q -0 parameter set in Lame, but now that I have much more HDD capacity, I have begun ripping them to WAV.

However, I would still like the Artist, Album, Year, Duration etc. details columns in Windows Explorer to display the correct information. My question is how to achieve this with WAV files, or other lossless formats (eg. FLAC or APE). I have read that it is possible to tag WAV files, but it breaks them up and can render them unplayable, or something (I won't pretend I understand). I also tried using MP3Tag to tag FLAC files, but the information did not appear in the fields in Windows. I have noticed that whereas with MP3 files, right-click, Properties, Summary tab, Advanced allows you to enter ID3 information, if you try this with WAV files, you cannot enter any new information at all, and with FLAC files, you can only enter limited information (Author, Title - as if the file was a Word document for example). As of yet I have not tried Monkey's Audio lossless compression.

All you lossless-philes out there - how do you tag your music?

Many thanks

I tag all of my music files with foobar2000. I recommend it though this information won't show up in Windows. For mp3s you still need a program called mp3inf AFAIR.

So even you have a lot of free harddisk space use a lossless encoder instesd of using WAV files. The tagging is much easier and you won't have the problem of breaking the wav files up.

to display the tag info in windows explorer, you'll need to add the capabilities to read the tags into the windows shell.

i googled windows shell flac and a few results came up, you could try some of those to get the tags to show up in windows explorer.

FYI: I don't think the WAV format supports tags.

-brendan

Wave files do support limited tags, some programs extend it further by having a riff chunk that is an id3v2 tag. Then there is the broadcast extension for tagging wave files.

I've tried to make the xp explorer show .wav tags some while ago and couldn't get it to do so. I edit samples in soundforge and saved some comments with the file because I thought you could sort the files after comment later. Tried it for days and couldn't find any info on the subject on how to do it. If you can get it working please foward the info. Would appreciate it very much!

AFAIK the Alpha version of dBpowerAMP Music Converter R12 is the only program which will enable explorer columns for tagged wave files (as well as editing the tags on a property page).

Sounds nice spoon! I use foobar to convert files to other formats so I'd just need the explorer extension. Can you tell me how you modify the win explorer manually to display .wav comments?

I found a similar (freeware) tool here: http://www.softpointer.com/AudioShell.htm

Doesn't support .wav metadata however

Ahhh so people HAVE replied - I thought email notification would be enabled by default, so I haven't checked the forum! OK so forget WAV - what's the general consensus - FLAC or APE, or another lossless format? Either way, I'll just have a look for a shell extension. Thanks for your comments!

Currently the codec of lossless choice is either FLAC or WavPack. You might find these recent topics interesting:
Pinned: Which is the best lossless codec?
Poll: What's your lossless codec of choice?
Poll: Which lossless audio codec do you use?

There is a similar tool with wav support, mp3infp
It also add some explorer shell extensions, you can see my try below.

However this tool does not support command line tagging (at least I don't know), I really hope that it will be added soon.

Cheers,
Tony

screenshot

Absolutely perfect!! Thanks alot for that link!