Hi there, so upon investigating the metadata from ripping my audio CDs to WAV, I have noticed that the metadata has been storing many “?” characters. In comparison to my FLAC rips of the same media, I have noticed that the “?” characters have been completely absent, or near completely absent. I was wondering as to why this may be the case. I also noticed that this appears to only be happening with other language characters.
This leads me to my question, does WAV support non English languages being stored in the metadata?
It’s possible to embed metadata into wav files. But it does not always work that well. Not only does it sometimes do weird stuff with uncommon letters as you described. Sometimes they are just gone when you move them to another player, or device. Even if you embedded them in some way.
I would recommend download flac.exe or install the flac libraries and just do a flac *.wav and rm *.wav and be done with wav.
There is really not reason to have them. Both are lossless and you don’t loose anything doing it. You gain storage space and better metadata support.
In theory the RIFF container supports and extremely wide range of data, including metadata which can theoretically even be ID3tags. Problem is, it is not standardised fir RIFF WAVE files, so results between devices and software differ wildly. From full support over weird support or dropped metadata chunks to ouright refusing to play the files, everything is possible.
My guess is that whatever player you’re using assumes a plain ASCII charset (which is used on CDs as CD Text, even tho this isn’t strictly specified either), and therefore can’t display foreign letters.
But either way, I agree with @maximal here, apart from some odd edge cases where FLAC doesn’t have support, there is no reason to use WAV ever*.
Strictly speaking FLAC does have more overhead for decoding but this should be a non issue on any hardware of the last 20 years so…
*maybe in music production because it doesn’t require encoding.
I can confirm that WAV does support non English languages. Seems to be Windows Explorer, and Windows Media Player ripping to blame/be an issue (whatever, you get the idea).
To test this, I opened the file in Foobar2000, right clicked, and selected properties, and then added the non English characters and non standard basic fonts from the same media file, just in a different codec.
Seems like when you rip with Windows Media Player, it doesn’t store the metadata well for WAV. Other codecs on the other hand, like ALAC, seem to be fine. So from this I guess it’s just compatibility and wise choices.