RE: old burned cd file in wav

Fred,

 

I am one of those less technical people you mentioned.  I am confused by your comments.  FLAC doesn’t take ID3 Tags, my assumption is that data would be discarded when writing the file, but your comments make it seem like they would be written to the file, just ignored by a music player.  Can you point me to a primer that might help me get the necessary understanding?

 

Thanks,

 

Mike W.

 

 

 

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2020 6:57 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [EAC] old burned cd file in wav

 

  

We’re down in the weeds here, and I recognize that we are not talking about massive differences in functionality, but it’s an interesting subject to me — and since I’m the moderator, it’s all about me.





ID3 tags are "acceptable" in the sense that they don't break the file and stop it from playing, or decoding. My copy of EAC (and Easy AC) doesn't add ID3 tags to FLAC files, because I didn't tell it to do such a stupid thing. Nonetheless, the reference decoder is robust enough to play the file even if I were that stupid. Would you prefer it to slap me upside the head and prevent me from rescuing my music with, say, mp3tag that can strip off or convert ID3 tags to FLAC tags? I would expect such dictatorial behavior from a Microsoft product, not an open-source one.

 

How would it stop you from ‘rescuing your music’ if the reference decoder put up a warning message saying that the files were corrupted and should be fixed prior to being played?  That’s a lot better than you spending hours putting together a bunch of FLAC files only to have the person you sent them to find that they won’t play because he/she uses a different, but standards-compliant, FLAC decoder can’t deal with the ID3 tags that you did not know were in the FLAC files.

 

Yup. I can use any, all, or none. Very flexible. Works for me.

 

Not everyone who listens to music is tech savvy.  Think of some guy deciding that the FLAC field names should all be in his native language of Tagalog only to later lose all of his hard work at tagging when he tries to convert from FLAC to ALAC, MP3, etc.  Standards are not supposed to be suggestions.  That’s how they assure interoperability..  

 

Anyway, if you start with "rigidly specified" tag names, they do transport back and forth, and those are the ones most likely to be used by almost everyone -- but if you, yourself, alone, have a special need for a custom tag, you can use it in FLAC.

 

That argues for the ability to add custom tags to FLAC, not for FLAC to abandon the notion of a basic, standardized, required set of tags.  

 

The DATA. the MUSIC, is lossless in either format. Isn't that what really matters?

 

But that’s all the same if it’s lossless, so it’s other aspects that have to be deciding factors when choosing between FLAC, ALAC, Monkey’s Audio, TAK, etc.





My devices -- including my wife's Mac -- support whatever plays in VLC. I'm just not locked up in an Apple-run prison, so I'd rather be flexible than depend on "native" support from a vendor with a profit motive and a lust for power.

 

Yes, I am locked up in an Apple-run prison with easy access, often through Apple’s own app stores, to non-Apple software that plays music encoded in Apple’s open source CODECs as well as competing CODECs like FLAC, MP3, 

 

I listen to my music on my iMac through Colibri, which can play ALAC, APE, DSD, FLAC, MIDI, MOD, MP3, TTA, and WavPack.  On my audio system, I use a music server running moOde which can play ALAC, AAC, and numerous non-Apple CODECs.  

 

On my iPhone, iPad, and iPod, I use Apple’s own players because I am in an Apple-run prison..  Oh, wait, no… it’s because the ecosystem works well and I like it.  There are Apple-supplied tools to automatically downsample my lossless files to AAC files, allowing me to sync my whole music library to my mobile devices.  Apple’s metadata editing works very well and is intuitive.  The database approach means my somewhat brain-dead car stereo head units can handle sorting and searching by artist, album, song, etc. when my iPod is connected.

 

That we largely agree on things is what makes debating those things we disagree on worthwhile.

 

— Fred