I have my music library encoded to TAK, and last night I was decoding some of the music and then re-encoding them again with the new TAK 1.0.2 files, but in the process they lost their tags. How can I keep this from happening? Do I even need to decode the files, or can I just reencode them from TAK?

Any application decodes the data prior to encoding it again. But this should be done by one which is able to copy the tags from the sources and paste them into the targets. Decoding the TAKs to intermediate WAVs without storing the metadata somewhere first results in the loss of all tags, because WAV isn't designed for holding this data. I hope you haven't deleted the sources yet, otherwise you have a good amount of work before you.

Use an application which features both TAK decoding and encoding as well as full tagging support. I'm only aware of foobar2000 with the correct plugins meeting this requirement. It might also be possible that the TAK encoder itself features TAK-to-TAK (that sounds somewhat silly ) transcoding, allowing you to batch-process the files. Don't know whether it does (FLAC-user here), hence someone else needs to shed some light on this matter.

I assume that foobar would retain the tags if you set up a Converter profile.

A command line alternative would be to decode to WAVE, re-encode to TAK, and then copy the tags from the source to the destination using Case's Tag (--fromfile switch), or David Bryant's CopyTags.

Question regarding foobar: To decode to wav (I have the correct TAK plug-ins), do I choose to convert to wav? Or is there a separate decode fuction?

with foobar2000 you would convert straight from TAK to TAK

:-)

Unless you're shooting for a higher compression level, what's the point of transcoding TAK?

Thanks, everyone!

You may also think you need a lower complexity or you just want to take advantage of some improvements (for example more efficiency) of a new version of TAK ...

It seems like the OP went through a lot of unnecessary time and trouble since the only significant improvement was in the encoding speed (at the cost of a slight decrease in compression) and since the files were already encoded...

I only tried this out with a batch of files, as in 10 albums or so. I have since reconsidered my methods.