4 Sep
2023
4 Sep
'23
9:35 a.m.
Can anyone suggest a program that can edit metadata in 24bit wav files.
It seems Picard treats these as faulty - all the music players have no problems.
--
Will J Godfrey {apparently now an 'elderly'}
https://willgodfrey.bandcamp.com/
http://yoshimi.github.io
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.
4 Sep
4 Sep
10:17 a.m.
On September 3, 2023 11:35:02 PM HST, Will Godfrey <willgodfrey(a)musically.me.uk>
wrote:
Can anyone suggest a program that can edit metadata in
24bit wav files.
It seems Picard treats these as faulty - all the music players have no problems.
Hmm...I didn't think WAV files *had* metadata?
---
David W. Jones
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
exploring the landscape of god
http://dancingtreefrog.com
Sent from my Android device with F/LOSS K-9 Mail.
10:29 a.m.
On Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:17:46 -1000
"David W. Jones" <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
On September 3, 2023 11:35:02 PM HST, Will Godfrey
<willgodfrey(a)musically.me.uk> wrote:
Well, according to Audacity they have:
Artist Name
Track Title
Album Title
Track Number
Year
Genre
Comments
I just loaded one into it that had all of these filled in except comments.
--
Will J Godfrey {apparently now an 'elderly'}
https://willgodfrey.bandcamp.com/
http://yoshimi.github.io
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.
Can anyone suggest a program that can edit
metadata in 24bit wav files.
It seems Picard treats these as faulty - all the music players have no problems.
Hmm...I didn't think WAV files *had* metadata? 
10:33 a.m.
On Mon, Sep 04, 2023 at 10:35:02AM +0100, Will Godfrey wrote:
Can anyone suggest a program that can edit metadata in
24bit wav files.
It seems Picard treats these as faulty - all the music players have no problems.
I assume that 'metadata' refers to the header.
No idea if the problem is with Picard or the files, but I suspect
something along these lines:
- There are (at least) two formats known as .wav files: WAV and
WAVEX.
- The original WAV header format was badly designed and resulted in
lots of proprietary extensions and 'improvements'.
- Many years ago M$ tried to clean up the messs by creating the
WAVEX format.
- From then on, according to M$ standards, anything using more than
2 channels or 16 bits MUST use the WAVEX format.
I suspect you could have some 24-bit files using the WAV format which
are technically 'defect'. There is still software around creating those.
The way to find out is to look at an hex dump of the header. Maybe you
could post one - the first 256 bytes will do.
Ciao,
--
FA
10:52 a.m.
On Mon, 4 Sep 2023 12:33:42 +0200
Fons Adriaensen <fons(a)linuxaudio.org> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 04, 2023 at 10:35:02AM +0100, Will Godfrey
wrote:
Thanks Fons - didn't think of that!
00000000 52 49 46 46 3c b7 1f 04 57 41 56 45 66 6d 74 20 |RIFF<...WAVEfmt |
00000000 52 49 46 46 3c b7 1f 04 57 41 56 45 66 6d 74 20 |RIFF<...WAVEfmt |
00000010 10 00 00 00 01 00 02 00 80 bb 00 00 00 65 04 00 |.............e..|
00000010 10 00 00 00 01 00 02 00 80 bb 00 00 00 65 04 00 |.............e..|
00000020 06 00 18 00 64 61 74 61 cc b5 1f 04 00 00 00 ff |....data........|
00000020 06 00 18 00 64 61 74 61 cc b5 1f 04 00 00 00 ff |....data........|
00000030 ff ff 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 00 |................|
So they're marked (wrongly?) as WAVE.
The fact they contain the metadata might suggest they are actually WAVEX
However this doesn't show in a readable form in the first 1024 bytes.
--
Will J Godfrey {apparently now an 'elderly'}
https://willgodfrey.bandcamp.com/
http://yoshimi.github.io
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.
Can anyone suggest a program that can edit
metadata in 24bit wav files.
It seems Picard treats these as faulty - all the music players have no problems.
I assume that 'metadata' refers to the header.
No idea if the problem is with Picard or the files, but I suspect
something along these lines:
- There are (at least) two formats known as .wav files: WAV and
WAVEX.
- The original WAV header format was badly designed and resulted in
lots of proprietary extensions and 'improvements'.
- Many years ago M$ tried to clean up the messs by creating the
WAVEX format.
- From then on, according to M$ standards, anything using more than
2 channels or 16 bits MUST use the WAVEX format.
I suspect you could have some 24-bit files using the WAV format which
are technically 'defect'. There is still software around creating those.
The way to find out is to look at an hex dump of the header. Maybe you
could post one - the first 256 bytes will do.
Ciao,
12:56 p.m.
On Mon, Sep 04, 2023 at 11:52:46AM +0100, Will Godfrey wrote:
(duplicate lines removed)
00000000 52 49 46 46 3c b7 1f 04 57 41 56 45 66 6d
74 20 |RIFF<...WAVEfmt |
00000010 10 00 00 00 01 00 02 00 80 bb 00 00 00 65 04 00 |.............e..|
00000020 06 00 18 00 64 61 74 61 cc b5 1f 04 00 00 00 ff |....data........|
00000030 ff ff 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 00 00 ff ff ff 00 00 |................|
Apart from the 'fmt' chunk (which all WAV files have), there is no
metadata in this file. The only other 'data' chunk (starting at 0x0024)
contains the actual samples up to the end of the file.
00000010 10 00 00 00
These four bytes are the size of the 'fmt' chunk, in this case
16 bytes.
I actually simplified things a bit in my previous post. There
are four possible sizes for the 'fmt' chunk:
size M$ name
------------------------------
14 WAVEFORMAT
16 PCMWAVEFORMAT
18 WAVEFORMATEX
40 WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE
The first two are officially obsolete. So this file should be
considered as non-standard. But e.g. libsndfile still writes
this format - it should use at least WAVEFORMATEX (18 bytes),
and the 40-byte version for more than 2 chan or 16 bits.
All software I know of will accept the 16 byte format for
reading, even if doing the right thing and use the 18 or 40
byte format when creating a new file.
I have lots of files with a similar 'fmt' chunk and Picard
does accept them. So it's not really clear what should be
the problem.
The one thing that is suspect is that the total file size
(0x041fb73c) is longer than the 'data' chunk plus its offset.
So is there something special at the end (look at the last
1024 bytes) ? If any real metadata is stored there, I'm not
sure if that is OK. I'd expect the 'data' chunk to be the
last one.
Ciao,
--
FA
2:26 p.m.
On Mon, 4 Sep 2023 14:56:45 +0200
Fons Adriaensen <fons(a)linuxaudio.org> wrote:
The one thing that is suspect is that the total file
size
(0x041fb73c) is longer than the 'data' chunk plus its offset.
So is there something special at the end (look at the last
1024 bytes) ? If any real metadata is stored there, I'm not
sure if that is OK. I'd expect the 'data' chunk to be the
last one.
Ciao,
Didn't think of that. Yes, that's what Audacity (and Tenacity) do, stick the
metadata on the end.
I've been thinking of converting all my audio files to flac for a while now
(mostly to free up space) and with Lorenzo's comments about metadata that's
another good reason for doing so.
--
Will J Godfrey {apparently now an 'elderly'}
https://willgodfrey.bandcamp.com/
http://yoshimi.github.io
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.
10:58 a.m.
On 04/09/2023 11:35, Will Godfrey wrote:
Can anyone suggest a program that can edit metadata in
24bit wav files.
It seems Picard treats these as faulty - all the music players have no problems.
I use Kid3 to edit metadata of compressed formats (e.g. FLAC, mp3, opus)
and it seems to be able to write limited metadata to a wav file in what
it calls 'Tag 2' (ID3v2.3.0). According to Wikipedia [1] these are
stored in the extra chuncks. A quick test I did with players I usually
used showed that Audacious sees nothing while SMPlayer and VLC will pick
up some metadata when selecting the detailed info. Interestingly I was
able to add a 'cover' image which both SMPlayer and VLC showed in the
video area when playing the file.
I guess maybe for 'archival' purposes where one would add metadata a
format like FLAC which foresees metadata in the format [2] might be better?
Hope this helps
Lorenzo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV?useskin=vector#Metadata
[2] https://xiph.org/flac/documentation_format_overview.html
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7 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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David W. Jones -
Fons Adriaensen -
Lorenzo Sutton -
Will Godfrey