Transcoding wav to flac

[paultaylor]

(02-03-2017 10:40)simoncn Wrote:  Converting from WAV to FLAC using dBpoweramp will preserve any tags in your WAV files.

Its worth noting that unless something has changed recently this isn't entirely true, whilst DbPoweramp converts most existing tags it doesnt convert all of them and doesnt convert some properly.

For example it ignores the following fields:

- The UFID frame (Unique File Id, i.e MusicBrainz Recording Id)
- The IPLS frame (Involved people list)

It replaces the existing value of TMED (Media) field with its own value.

And for ID3 many values are stored in a TXXX frames, consisting of a name and a value. The trouble is that DbPoweramp naively keeps the name as it is, but for some fields it is expected the name changes depending on what tagging format they are being used with. For example all MusicBrainz enabled taggers use the standard defined by MusicBrainz Picard to use MusicBrainz Album Id when using ID3 (as in Wav) but when tagging a Flac file they use MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID, but if converting from Wav to Flac DbPoweramp BatchConverter just creates a field called MusicBrainz Album Id which is not recognized by any MusicBrainz compatible tagger as it expects MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID for flac files. With hindsight it would have been better if MusicBrainz had kept the same value for all tagging formats, but unfortunatey that is not the case.

But this mapping problem can be fixed by using DBPoweramp ID Tag Processing option but I dont know of any way to preserve data in the UFID or IPLS fields.