Glad to see this topic- I am just getting started in this area and have several questions/requests. My situation is that I have a large (over 1k) LP collection (also over 500CDs) and I want to digitize everything. I already have ways of recording the LPs into WAV files using Audacity, then doing some cleanup and separating each cut. The problem is that WAV files do not use tags, and it appears that each type of player prgm has resources to add metadata of some type, but it doesn't always transfer between prgms. I intend to archive all my LPs in WAV on a large HD and then I can pick and choose what I want to put on my laptop or portable music player in a compressed format. I have chosen mp3 so far exactly for the reason of compatibility/standardization of the tag info. However, it would be nice if there were some way to "tag" the WAV files and have that info transfer to other formats once converted. Maybe you have some ideas or can point us to someone who has looked into this?
thanx
Michael Koby
· 2 years ago
Kirk, What I would do for your LPs is digitize them to wav using Audacity like you plan to. But instead of storing them in the WAV format store them in a lossless format that supports tagging. My recommendation would be to use the FLAC format since you can tag those files in using Tag Rename (which we will use to tag our files in this series). The cool part is that with lossless compression, if you need to go back to WAV you can and have the exact same file you started with. Another upside is that if you use something to convert the files from FLAC to Mp3, most conversion programs out there that support both formats will carry over the metadata from the FLAC files to the mp3 counterparts.
The FLAC format is fairly supported but you will not get support for it in iTunes or Windows Media Player. But since you plan on converting to mp3 for the items you want on your laptop or portable player, this won't be much of a problem. There are FLAC plugins that will give you some functionality for the format on iTunes and Windows Media Player. There are also plugins for Winamp.
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thanx
The FLAC format is fairly supported but you will not get support for it in iTunes or Windows Media Player. But since you plan on converting to mp3 for the items you want on your laptop or portable player, this won't be much of a problem. There are FLAC plugins that will give you some functionality for the format on iTunes and Windows Media Player. There are also plugins for Winamp.