#Wav tag editor for mac
#Wav tag editor software
#Wav tag editor free

An online search will turn up many free WAV and MP3-tag editing tools that will open the audio file header and display a form into which you can fill in the information. To enter your own metadata and tags, you need the right tool. Better yet, most audio metadata fields include a comments field that can hold a lot of text.

So in your recording you could put the interviewee’s name as the Artist, give the Date of the recording and even title your interview session in the Song field.

#Wav tag editor software

There is plenty of software available for adding metadata but still, among all of the software, the metadata field names are pre-set with musical titles. Let’s say you’ve recorded an interview and you want to add information about the recording to the audio file. In WAV files, these terms are represented by four-character codes, e.g., IART for artist, ICRD for creation date, and so on (there’s a list in the document cited above). So audio metadata fields (sometimes called “frames”) have names like Artist, Song, Date and Genre, though there are many more field types available. Metadata field names in audio file headers are oriented to music recordings, even though the term “audio” includes spoken voice, and natural and human-made sounds. This is called the header and it is where the metadata resides. But you’d also see - at the beginning or the end of the file - an area with plain English words describing the contents of the file.

#Wav tag editor for mac

If you open a WAV or MP3 file with, say, a text editor such as SimpleText for Mac or Notepad for PC, you’ll see a dense mass of characters representing the audio data itself. For more detailed information on embedding metadata you can consult the Federal Agencies Guideline titled “ Embedding Metadata in Digital Audio Files.” The added text information is called metadata and the process of adding descriptive text to an audio file is sometimes referred to as tagging. The appeal of compression is that a smaller, compressed file transfers quickly over the Internet and between devices much quicker than a large file. More often than not, the audio it contains is uncompressed, which means that it remains exactly the same size as when it was recorded and it hasn’t been squished down into a smaller file size.Īn MP3 is compressed, which means that some of the “less important” digital data – for example, frequencies that you probably couldn’t hear anyway – gets removed, which reduces the size of the file. Given the variety of digital audio files that exist, for this post we’ll just look at two of the most widely used formats: WAV and MP3. And if you modify information about a recording while you are in one of these applications, you just modify database information the information contained in the recording itself will not be affected. These systems do not embed metadata into the individual audio files. These applications may display the title, artist and other information about the recording but all of that information comes from the database. I mentioned the way some applications manage your sound collection with a database of information about the music it stores. At the end of this post I’ll present a few experiments you can use to test audio files with embedded descriptions. But if you are aware of the potential issues, you can keep your text intact inside their host audio files. Audio files can also lose those descriptions as the files get copied, transferred from device to device or processed with different apps or software. Or rather, embedded information generally travels with the file.

Embedded information travels with the file. It is also a good practice if you intend to keep the file for a long time and want the file to be self-documenting and give you information about itself. If you want the file to display information you have to add it in yourself.Īdding a description is easy to do. That’s because the descriptive information is missing there’s nothing to display. If you create your own digital recording – such as an interview or a band recording – and play the audio file on an audio-enabled device, the player might display only the name of the file and nothing more. This blog is about embedding, how song information can be inserted into a special section of that audio file and become part of the file. Sometimes that happens because the player has an associated database, sometime that happens because the information is embedded in the file. As you play a digital music file on an audio-enabled device such as a computer or smart phone, the audio player displays information about the song.