converting while preserving metadata   

Hi Folks,

I just spend the weekend failing to do what seems should be trivial task.

Here's the situation.  I ripped my CDs into WMA lossless files so that I'd 
never have to rip them again, and would now like to do that conversion into a 
smaller lossy format.  I've found plenty of ways to do this much.  
Incidently, I'm fairly agnostic which output format I get; a lossy WMA file 
or MP3 would be fine.

What seems to be rocket science is to carry over the metadata (album, track 
number, composer, etc.) when I make the conversion.  There are plenty of 
tools to edit tags once the conversion is complete, but I've spent a fair bit 
of time getting the tags right (classical CDs are a pain) and don't want to 
have to manually redo them.

All I really need is a simple command that converts one file to another 
preserving the tags.  I can write the rest of the script.  Sadly, I can't 
find this program.

Am I looking in the wrong places, or does such a thing not exist?

Thanks much,
-Isaac

date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:02:04 -0700   author:   Isaac

Re: converting while preserving metadata   

On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:02:04 -0700, Isaac
 wrote:

>Hi Folks,
>
>I just spend the weekend failing to do what seems should be trivial task.
>
>Here's the situation.  I ripped my CDs into WMA lossless files so that I'd 
>never have to rip them again, and would now like to do that conversion into a 
>smaller lossy format.  I've found plenty of ways to do this much.  
>Incidently, I'm fairly agnostic which output format I get; a lossy WMA file 
>or MP3 would be fine.
>
>What seems to be rocket science is to carry over the metadata (album, track 
>number, composer, etc.) when I make the conversion.  There are plenty of 
>tools to edit tags once the conversion is complete, but I've spent a fair bit 
>of time getting the tags right (classical CDs are a pain) and don't want to 
>have to manually redo them.
>
>All I really need is a simple command that converts one file to another 
>preserving the tags.  I can write the rest of the script.  Sadly, I can't 
>find this program.
>
>Am I looking in the wrong places, or does such a thing not exist?


I'm not sure it does, though it's not a completely closed ecosystem.

The picture is complicated by media player storing some metadata in
the files (such as the ID3 tags) and other metadata in the library
database (and some is duplicated in both places).

MSDN's complete attribute reference for metadata is here
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb248408.aspx


That's scriptable to the extent that if you're familiar with coding
javascript or VB you should be able to hack something together.

Each section indicates where the metadata is stored. Without using an
integrated tool to convert the files from one format to another which
is library aware, there's a risk that some of your info will "go
missing" when you move the files from one platform to another.

Dale Preston has a metadata backup tool available :
http://www.dalepreston.com/Blog/2007/03/windows-media-player-metadata-backup.html

Perhaps the best stop is to put in a change request and see if he has
spare time to extend it to "write attribute to files"

HTH
Cheers - Neil
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2007
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs

date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:04:04 GMT   author:   Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media]