Hi, I’m in the process of transferring all my DATs to a computer. They are all live shows and I want to track them out and export them to a hard drive for setup on a NAS at some point. I’m having trouble getting the CD text function to write the artist and album into to the exported files (.wav, though it needed I might go to FLAC) and was wondering if anyone has tips on that. I enter it in the album field, but when I export it doesn’t carry over. Ultimately, I am going to transfer the entire music library to an SSD for a Roon server setup, and I want Roon to recognize the metadata when it organizes the library.
I know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish, and I would mostly not use Wavelab for the metadata part of this process. Instead, I would use Wavelab to get each track / file named sensibly, and another program to do the actual metadata tagging based on that file name and any info you want to include.
Also, there’s no reason to get CD text onto files that you won’t be making into CDs from anyway. It’s the metadata tagging you really want for Roon.
To get there, you could:
Use marker batch renaming in Wavelab to turn the marker names – e.g., for a song called “Dorita” – into something like this: LouReed1996-03-30t01_Dorita
Next, you split up the audio into tracks by the markers, naming each track by the marker name, e.g., LouReed1996-03-30t01_Dorita.wav or LouReed1996-03-30t01_Dorita.flac. Getting files into to FLAC before tagging is better, but you can tag .wav files if you really want to.
Then, once you have one file per song, you can then use a program like mp3tag to tag the files based on the file name. Roon (and any other media player) will be happy with that. The script is something like this, in the Filname > Tag converter: %artist%%year%t%track%_%title%
You can also automate the process of adding additional tags using mp3tag, if you want.
There are a lot of reasons I would do it this way, even though you can accomplish much of it in Wavelab if you really want to.
Hi. I was trying to avoid paying for mp3 tag :). I had used it for some shows I recorded recently, like Gov’t Mule and Folks, and it works, but I guess I need to pony up for the paid version for this project. Is there anything specific about why you prefer MP3Tag to WL for this?
MP3tag asks for a donation, so you can pay what you wish for it. And there are other tagging programs (though I don’t use and can’t recommend any).
I prefer it because it’s intended for hobbyist tagging and to make mass tagging and re-tagging simple, quick and easy. Wavelab is designed for professional music production where you’re paying someone to get it right the first time because you can’t go back and fix it once it’s handed to a client. By contrast, you can change things at home as often as you like, and you may well once you start with Roon and see how it goes. Also, you’re not looking to put ISRC codes into your audio. You don’t need tags like “copyright” or “dimensions” either. You may want tags that aren’t standard, like “source” and “venue” and maybe “rating” and also that “year” really be the full date. You definitely want track #s to be two-digit automatically. You don’t need your tagging your software to fight you over industry standards.
Within Roon, if you discover that something isn’t quite right - e.g., you should have used “Album artist” instead of “Artist” or if you want to add additional musicians to a field like “composer” – you want to be able to batch-correct your tags if possible, and especially without watching Wavelab decode each and every .flac file to .wav first, or by trying to load a montage that you closed out long ago (you will be told that Wavelab can’t find any of the original .wav files and be asked to locate them one at a a time.)
You can probably do most of what you want using the the Metadata tab in Wavelab, by choosing id3/iTunes as the tag type. But Wavelab is really overkill, and is also inconvenient compared to a dedicated tagging program.