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WAV to FLAC - populating tags

I

IanRB

pfm Member
I have several hundred CDs which over the years I have ripped to WAV files. To improve the way I navigate these files I now need to convert them to FLACs. The actual WAV to FLAC conversion can be done easily using dbpoweramp. This produces FLAC files containing audio data, but with none of the tags populated. There are many utilities which claim to populate most of the CD and track level tags, but none of them seem to deliver. Does anyone have experience of software which can reliably do this?

Thanks, Ian.
 
IanRB said:
I have several hundred CDs which over the years I have ripped to WAV files. To improve the way I navigate these files I now need to convert them to FLACs. The actual WAV to FLAC conversion can be done easily using dbpoweramp. This produces FLAC files containing audio data, but with none of the tags populated. There are many utilities which claim to populate most of the CD and track level tags, but none of them seem to deliver. Does anyone have experience of software which can reliably do this?

Thanks, Ian.
Click to expand...

JRiver allows you to tag manually. But I guess you're looking for something to automate the process.
 
JRiver will also populate tags from the file path, so if you have used something like Genre/Artist/Album for example, JRiver can get tags from that. You can get a free trial for far longer than you need to do what you want, and you can also as a first step just load the tags into JRivers own database and use them from there, rather than update your files themselves. Then if and when you are sure you’ve got it cracked you can update the files themselves from JRivers database. It’s very powerful and the guys on the forum are very helpful.
 
My own answer was "nope" - nothing I used created a repeatable set of tags, at least in a consistent format, that made searching a large library easy

My solution was to create my own spreadsheet which I manually populate, with about 12 columns. each for a specific tag: album, artist, trackname etc - takes 2-3 minutes to fill this for an LP, and as every tag goes in its own column, its 100% consistent. I simply combine (concatenate) the content in the columns into a single delimited string, which I then use as the filename - it was a pig to overwrite the filenames in windows one-by-one, so I wrote some visual basic code in the spreadsheet to bulk overwrite the filenames in the windows folder in one go - all it needs to know are the current filenames. In my case this is easy as I rip from vinyl and they are automatically split as 01.flac, 02.flac etc - but in your case, where they will be called whatever the person defining the original CD decided to call them, you can use a simple windows command to copy all the existing filenames and paste them into the spreadsheet in one go, and then just run the code. I typically wait until I have about 200 or so individual files that need doing, and it takes a couple of seconds to run

So now I have 200 files named with my own format - but still no tags! The trick now is using JRiver, as irb mentioned, which has a menu command to "fill properties from filename", which does what it says - grabs the individual tags that are stored in the now longish filename and use them to fill the individual tags. Most tag editors have a similar function, i just use JRiver because its my frontend. I have successfully renamed over 65,000 files like this

Happy to share the file if anyone is particularly interested, but unless you are an excel power user, it might take me a little time to write some instructions :)

Might sound complicated, but I tend to fill in the spreadsheet as the album copies, so its not really adding much, if any, time, and the end result of having a large library with all tracks using an identical tag format is, for me, more than worth it
 
I tried MP3tag a few years ago and got a free computer virus with it! Is it seciure these days?
 
I paid about $20 for a license for 'Tag Editor' for mac. It seemed expensive but it made getting our library into shape 10x faster than free tag editors we were using. It can auto-populate tags and lets you select the data source (e.g. musicbrainz) and specific release. It has a spreadsheet style editor that makes it fast to do things like setting a whole column to the same value (e.g. artist, album name, year).
 
Third (or fourth?) MP3 tag. Been using it for years with no issues.

You can tag from filenames (and do sub folders, so you could do the whole lot in one), or get data from freedb, and get cover art.
 
MP3 tag works brilliantly for me for many years.
You can edit/write tags yourself if needs must - I had to do this for a recent album that databases couldn't find. I found a blog post with all the information required and copied and pasted text into the fields.
 
Do the wav files have album/artist/track in the file name?

If they are all marked as untitled, then its a long time ahead for you, but if it has some data in the file name then MP3TAG can take that information and put it into tags. You then save the wavs then you can convert to FLAC retaining those tags.
 
You have a few options - beets, Picard, Songkong etc. First two are free and all should do a reasonable job based on the musicbrainz database.

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The one I'd go with is importing the lot into Roon, sorting out the few unidentified albums you'll inevitably encounter (read their knowledge base to minimise this by naming multi cd set files 'discnumber - tracknumber - title' or filing them in album/cd1, album/cd2 etc.

When satisfied, select all albums in Roon and select export, which will copy all the albums to a destination folder tree of your choosing, embedding basic metadata in the process - you'll get track no, composer, artist, album, genre etc.
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Something Roon's good for, even if inadvertently. Best part is you can get it all done during the trial period, and if for some reason you don't manage, just run monthly sub till you're done or you decide to keep Roon.
 
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As said above I would use mp3tag. If you have logically and consistently named your WAV files you may be able to use the filename to tag conversion option to populate the tags. There are also various macro options to manipulate the tags.

I also have roon so the option mentioned above might also be good - although I have never used it for managing the embedded tags.
 
Paul_Riordan said:
I also have roon so the option mentioned above might also be good - although I have never used it for managing the embedded tags.
Click to expand...

I also wouldn't use it for managing file based tags, in fact you can't. But if moving from zero tags to taking care of the basics it's the quickest and most accurate method out there because you benefit from the curation Roon have done. Beyond the basics though, you have to use a separate tagger like MP3tag if running Windows.

I took this album, removed all tags, added to Roon then exported it to a new folder. This is what it yielded, no tagging on my part:
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MP3Tag is fine, but I prefer using Foobar2000 to edit tags as its ability to select multiple files and make edits automatically across all of them is quite effective.
 
Mp3tag did my entire Naim ripped library in one go so not sure why foobar is ahead there.
 
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