I’ll try to save the day. AIFF is Apple’s WAV clone. It accomodates information like the Rich Metadata you mention for allowing external applications to see images, links, etc etc.
You can add Rich Metadata to a WAV, but then you need your program that plays it to support said metadata types and look for it in the WAV file. Because of what’s considered standard and necessary you’d probably need an addon to be seeing it.
AIFF works, and is of a good enough quality to definitely enjoy music. I don’t know if it’s audiophile grade but it sounds good to me in my not completely bad headset.
Well, if it’s designed that way that’s not exactly my fault.
Very few people have been using WAV for audio storage for a long time. Most casuals will use MP3s since they’re basically supported everywhere. The enthusiasts have been using alternative lossless formats for a long time.
In addition to that the metadata in WAV was never standardised as far as I know. Yes you can attach any kind of metadata to WAV files, but if and what is read depends on the player. And there we are again, WMP is not designed to look for them because very few people even use them to make it worthwile.
You can try WMP Plus and/or WMP Tag Plus and see if that helps you. It doesn’t list WAV specifically, but I had good success getting non-native formats to run with WMP. Until I stopped using WMP at least.
See the links above I haven’t used Win 7 in ages, but it worked for Win 8 and Win 10 at least. You only need the DirectShow filters for the playback, the plugin is just for the tag support.
The post suggests alternatives, yes. It also answers a question posted that specifically relates to itunes and why wav metadata isn’t parsed in any useful manner.
Generally wav metadata consists of a broadcast wav header for things like track names (multichannel wav is a thing, but useless in consumer hardware which expects an encoded bitstream for surround), markers, and timecode; not really useful for consumer stuff. If you want to add some you can use wave agent
But again this particular standard is probably mostly useless if you are just looking to tag music. I don’t doubt there are other implementations, and you can get an image on there in some software.
As far as AIFF, it’s exactly the same as wav. No bwav header, so a conversion will drop the metadata but both are linear PCM at any specified sample rate/bit depth.
Honestly FLAC is a good format when it’s well-supported (lossless quality but significantly smaller size). The problem I always had with it was not having codecs, especially on smaller devices like an ipod. I imagine it’s quite a lot more ubiquitous these days.
Fyi if you’re ever curious about what’s being taken out by compression, get a lossless file, encode a copy to whichever lossy format and back to wav, then drop them in a daw (audacity should work) together and flip the phase on one of them.
You can use ALAC instead if you’re concerned about iPods or iTunes in general. It’s also lossless, but the compression is less then FLAC. I’ve used it for a while when I used my GFs iPod.
But honestly, not sure if it’s even worth putting lossless on a mobile device… But to each their own.
I know I recommended MusicBee in another thread, but I tried it last night with an album from Bandcamp and I was able to assign metadata to .wav files. I even tested changing album art and it seemed to work.
I’ll give it a shot for WAV metadata editing album artwork hopefully soon (within a few days).
Thank you for the reminder.
I can’t remember why I didn’t proceed further looking into it though. I think I was busy with some other stuff going on IRL and needed a break, etc…
I mean you’re missing the point. You’re asking for help, people are giving you their collective experience and you’ll have to piece it together yourself to get what you want. You asked about wav metadata, and I gave you information with the caveat that wav is an old enough standard not to have complex consumer-oriented metadata; e.g., the way mp3 has id3. don’t like, it pick a different format, otherwise make the most of it, and let us know what you come up with.
I haven’t used Win 7 in ages, but it worked for Win 8 and Win 10 at least. You only need the DirectShow filters for the playback, the plugin is just for the tag support.