View Full Version : Should this be in the computer section? Maybe but only geeks go there.
Binoculars
25th Dec 2007, 09:38
I have on my external HDD a few, well in fact a lot of songs in WAV format. I am spending what I estimate will be the best part of ten days compressing them into mp3 format. But that's the easy part. The tag on these songs comes in the form of 01645501.wav. No artist, no title, nothing. Those familiar with radio station playlists may know of what I speak.
Apparently there is software available which easily recognises these files and can organise them into whatever category you would like, but I don't have access to that software. So I am left with about 11000 songs with no ID.
I could go through each of them with my fifteen year old and get probably ten percent of them to tag manually, but that will be another three months work.
Anybody know of which software I speak and how I can get hold of a copy?
stevehudd
25th Dec 2007, 15:12
I'm not a geek and I come here. I know what you need maybe to buy a CD and a CD player hope they are legal downloads:ok:
The Flying Pram
25th Dec 2007, 19:17
A while back I did some CD ripping and converting with "Express Rip" & "Switch" from Australian outfit NCH Swift Sound. I'm sure I remember one or other of these offering the facility to go online and look up album and track info. If the right details are found the tags can be added automatically. I did this for complete albums, so whether it would work for individual tracks I'm not sure. Switch has a tag editor feature to do it manually.
The problem is that, when ripping from a CD, each CD has a unique ID that the program can use to look up the details. It doesn't try to recognise the tracks by their content.
However, since they're from a radio station, could those be "Broadcast WAV" files? If so, they have additional metadata that may be useful. I've found a couple of tools on this site (http://www.quesosoft.com/), though I haven't tried them for myself.
Binoculars
27th Dec 2007, 05:32
Tried one of those programs, bnt, thinking the bwav format must have been the problem, but when I tried a random track, the program told me it was a simple wav file. Back to square one.
Thanks for your useful hint, Mr Hudd, but I can assure you I don't have enough time left on earth to download 11,000 songs.
Then all I can think of is: ask, nicely, for the index! There must be one somewhere, or those files are no use to anyone... :oh:
Binoculars
27th Dec 2007, 12:37
Well, they're not COMPLETELY useless. I started playing them from the top with my 14-going-on-24 year old daughter and between us we were getting maybe one in five from the first couple of bars. The first few were ZZ Top, and then several from the Zombies, then Zager and Evans and I forget the others but a dim light began to form in my mind so I have something to go on!
Oh well, maybe a never-ending retirement job; some people like jigsaw puzzles............