Topic: Help with metadata - Audacity / Foobar / Trader's Little Helper

[brad.bartels]

OK, so I've been struggling with metadata for quite some time. I'm running a PC with Windows7. I use Audacity to process / mix / track files, then File -> Export Multiple to get my .wav's. I've never been able to get Audacity to populate the metadata even though I've tried entering it during the Export Multiple step. I recently got Foobar 2.0 to populate the metadata on the .wav files. But with the MP3 converter I'm using (some freeware, I'm sure there are better alternatives and would appreciate any feedback on that subject), the metadata does not transfer or is preserved during the conversion. Additionally, when I use Trader's Little Helper to try to convert the .wav's to .flac's, it gets errors on the metadata and won't even convert the files to .flac, just aborts with errors.

What I am looking for is a way to enter the metadata once (assuming when the files are .wav's), then convert them to both flac and mp3 while saving / transferring the metadata so I don't have to enter it multiple times. Seems like it should be easy enough, but I can't figure out a process flow / software that will let me do this. Any help would be appreciated;) Since I'm starting with Audacity, would be curious what anyone else does or if they have a process flow for this. I must be missing something...

[davepeck]

I *think* WAV files store metadata differently than FLAC/mp3. I've never added metadata to WAV files before. I always convert to FLAC first, then add metadata to the FLACs (using a combination of the Foobar Live Show Tagger and Tag & Rename). If I convert those FLACs to mp3, the metadata comes over just fine (I use dbPoweramp for that).

Have you tried just skipping adding it to the WAVs and adding to the FLACs instead?

[runonce]

I *think* WAV files store metadata differently than FLAC/mp3. I've never added metadata to WAV files before. I always convert to FLAC first, then add metadata to the FLACs (using a combination of the Foobar Live Show Tagger and Tag & Rename). If I convert those FLACs to mp3, the metadata comes over just fine (I use dbPoweramp for that).

Have you tried just skipping adding it to the WAVs and adding to the FLACs instead?

Adding to that line of thought - maybe try exporting as FLAC from Audacity...and see of the meta info sticks...

[sacchini]

I'm used to MP3tag for tagging FLAC but I found out that Trader's Little Helper (used for SBE fix) loose the tags.
So I changed my workflow to:
- Audacity (for what you want) with timer set to show frames
- Medieval CUE splitter (CUE sheet manually prepared from frames read through Audacity) no need to SBE fixing later
- Trader's Little Helper or Exact Audio Copy (for converting to FLAC level
- MP3tag
- Trader's Little Helper (for MD5 and FFP fingerprints)

[brad.bartels]

I *think* WAV files store metadata differently than FLAC/mp3. I've never added metadata to WAV files before. I always convert to FLAC first, then add metadata to the FLACs (using a combination of the Foobar Live Show Tagger and Tag & Rename). If I convert those FLACs to mp3, the metadata comes over just fine (I use dbPoweramp for that).

Have you tried just skipping adding it to the WAVs and adding to the FLACs instead?

Thanks everyone for the help. I think you are right - if I add the metadata to the FLAC and convert FLAC to MP3, that works fine - it's all there. If I try to convert FLAC to WAV using TLH and check the "keep foreign metadata" box, I get errors.

And using metadata in Audacity and exporting directly to FLAC works as well! I don't really care about having the metadata in the WAV files, just the FLAC and MP3, so I think I'm set - I'll just start exporting from Audacity directly to FLAC.