Hi all,

I used EAC (after reading all the great stuff about it) to extract my CDs to WAV files. Since hard drive space is not an issue, I decided there isn't any need for compression.

However I noticed that these files don't have any ID3 tags?!

I did the same extraction using iTunes to WAV format and these WAV files seem to have ID3 tags.

Couple of questions:

1. Is there any downside of leaving all my audio in WAV format (besides of course the disk space)

2. How do I get ID3 tags when I extract audio using EAC?

3. If WAV audio files don't support ID3 tags, how come the files extracted from iTunes contain this info?

Very much confused!

Thanks
T

Sorry, mainstream usage of .WAV files has no tagging... EAC will only generate common metadata-free WAV files. iTunes only stores metadata for WAV files in it's own library database. iTunes will write tags to uncompressed AIFF, though... (but don't expect every application to read it.)

use a lossless format like Flac to store your songs. They can be tagged and
do contain also the orginal song.

Itunes will not play your flac...but foobar f.ex. will.

With XiphQT itunes will play your flacs.

It will if you install Xiph's Quicktime Components, and rip them as Ogg FLAC Or you could rip them as ALAC (Apple's Lossless format), pretty much all audio players can play them now.

Thanks for all the replies. I am not married to iTunes so I am willing to use any player that plays multiple formats. I have heard good things about Media Center - I believe this plays multiple formats such as mp3, ape, etc.

but only ogg flacs...no native flacs as I just found out




your best bet is foobar...but will take a little extra effort to get into the program.

J. River Media Center works well for me. It keeps track of over 25,000 FLAC files and lets me define different view schemes for different kinds of music. It allows me to use custom tags and database only fields to characterize my music files and I can use those fields in browser panes (like iTunes) to select files. I can have multiple libraries with different music files. I have run MC on a 3 year old laptop and a new Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of Ram. Great tag editing features. It works quickly, smoothly and without glitches on each PC. The J. River Media Center forums provide effective support.

Foobar was more work than I wanted to get it set up to fit my needs. There is an active community of people sharing info on setting it up on this forum and on other forums. I'd look for threads on setting up the Foobar UI before I took the plunge.

Media Center has a CD ripper with a secure mode builtin and I think Foobar does too. I have found having the ripping s/w integrated with tag editing is very useful. Having tag editing integrated with the playing s/w is also useful. When you see that something is not tagged correctly, you want to fix it then.

Bill