No major practical use for this yet (for me anyway) but I do appreciate WaveLab being ahead of the curve on this. Some clients get really hung up on ISRC codes and even though I tell them they’ll have to enter the codes again manually when they set up the digital distribution and submit each master WAV file, it seems to satisfy them greatly when I tell them the master WAV files will have the ISRC code embedded. I don’t think they fully get it until they actually get to the digital distribution setup, especially first timers.
For ISRC code approval, I always send them a spreadsheet view of their ISRC codes direct from my database if I have assigned codes for them. Also, they can see the ISRC codes in the HOFA DDP Player that accompanies the master(s) I send to them which covers situations when the client provides their own ISRC codes, as well as to double check when I am the ISRC code assigner. The HOFA DDP Player (and Sonoris OEM I believe) have the ability to embed the ISRC in WAV files if the client chooses to export each “CD Track” to WAV from the HOFA (or Sonoris) DDP Player.
I would imagine someday that digital distributors might be able to read the ISRC codes right from the WAV file. Either way, it’s a nice feature and it’s nice to just simply say “yes” when the client asks if the ISRC codes are applied to the “master files”.
As far as the ISRC codes carrying over to mp3 conversions…if you use Sonnox Pro Codec, you can send all the metadata from the WAV to the encoded AAC or mp3 files with one click. I have a feature request in with Sonnox to have an option to automatically transpose this metadata when encoding. And of course, if you render mp3 or AAC from the WaveLab montage, it adds that metadata based on CD-Text (and other info) if you have the right metadata settings in the montage before rendering.
I’m sure that most or all consumer mp3 encoding software will not transpose any metadata from the source WAV to the encoded file but again, that could change in the near future.