I’m using Wavelab Pro 12 to edit a bunch of my vinyl records I had captured years ago, and I’m having trouble exporting the metadata the way I need it to, which is rather basic. Album name, Artist, then track number and name, and the album thumbnail. My exports from Wavelab only give me one thing, the title marker name for each file, but zero metadata.
Now, I can add all of these via a small but great program called MP3Tag, which despite the name, works just as well for FLAC files. Adding everything with that program is actually easier than in Wavelab, but the problem is that for some albums, I might want to go back and adjust the effects I applied, so then I have to render all the tracks again, load them again in MP3Tag, and re-enter album title, artist, year, comments and thumbnail. Not the end of the world, but I want to capture a lot of my vinyls and if I have to enter all of that two or three times for many albums, it’s a waste of time when you add it all up. So I would prefer if I could enter all the metadata in Wavelab and have it export to the FLAC files without having to load the files later in MP3Tag to edit them.
So as you all know, there are two choices in Wavelab to insert metadata in the file, ‘Inherit from source file’ and ‘Specific to this configuration’:
Now, “Inherit from source file” would imply precisely that. I did a batch job once to convert all my FLAC library to MP3, and that setting successfully copied over all the metadata.
However, when it comes to vinyl captures I did in Cubase Pro 13 years ago, one WAV file per record side, or sometimes one large WAV file, there’s no metadata.
So I think, maybe the Inherit option includes the metadata I enter manually in the audio montage Metadata tab. So I tried that:
I even went to the picture tab and added the album cover.
I exported the montage again, with the option to export “All marked regions”, which exports separate files according to the markers I set to divide the audio file into titles. But this option doesn’t export any metadata, as the exported FLAC files don’t have any metadata when I open them in MP3Tag, and I still have to add everything.
So then if we try the other only option, “Specific to this configuration”, then edit, I get the window to enter the metadata, although not a lot of it, but at least some:
Those do export that metadata, and for some reason I can’t understand, add the field “Tag”, with the value “FLAC (FLAC)”:
Now, I don’t care if I have to enter the metadata in one place or another as long as it gets exported, but the problem with this second option is that it’s not saved as part of the audio montage project. It’s saved as part of the export format. So when I closed Wavelab and reopened it, selecting another project, if I were to export the project I just opened, it would insert the Erasure metadata into the Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” metadata. Knowing myself, 5% of the time I will forget to change that and end up with the wrong metadata in exported files. So that option doesn’t work for me.
What I would love to happen is this:
When I insert the title markers and define each song, I go to the Markers or Album tab and enter the name for each song. If I only enter the name, and not "## - " before it, it will export each file as the name I entered, so it’s useless. I have to enter “01 - name of song” and so on. I would love if there was a way to export each file in that naming convention without me having to enter 01 -, 02 -, and so on.
Then, I also would like to have the title number and name applied to the metadata as track number and title name. MP3Tag has a really smart way of handling this so that if the name of the file is 01 - name, I can apply a command that splits that into track 01 and name as title. But if it was already there it would be great.
The Album tab has a rather simple window to enter just a few things, but as long as it gives me the Artist and Album names, I’m peachy:
But, I already worked on ten or so of these projects, and whatever I enter in the fields shown above, it doesn’t transfer onto the FLAC files’ metadata.
I know this is long, and if you have read this far, thank you. I hope I was able to explain properly what I need, because my head is spinning.
To recount, I would like to have all the metadata already in the FLACs rendered from Wavelab Pro 12, without having to open the resulting files in MP3Tag to add album title, artist, comment, year and album cover thumbnail. Or at least, I would like to find a way to have Album title and Artist already there, preferably without that useless “FLAC (FLAC)” tag.
If any of you can shine some light on this, I would really appreciate it.
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