Jonas wrote:I still don't get the data entry part, sorry, I'm just not very "tech-ish".
Say I rip a cd to wav files and store them on my hard drive, with information taken down from freeDB or CDDB. Then later I decide I want to encode them into mp3's. Can I then get all this information about recording year, album, etc from freeDB or CDDB in the right places in my ID3 tags, not having to manually move the information from the file name of the wav file (since the wav file can't store metadata like in an ID3 tag as far as I know)?
I don't know why so many people go to the extra, unnecessary step of saving a WAV file, and THEN compressing to an MP3 file to create this issue, in the first place. As Jesse (Minor) noted, you still have the original CDs, so you are essentially wearing both belts and suspenders to keep your pants up. Indeed, losing the automatic data entry is sufficient reason for me to rip directly from the CD to MP3.
"Data entry" refers to the entering the song, album, artist, composer, and genre information. MP3 files have dozens of "tags" (embedded text file data fields) that store this information in the MP3 file, itself. These tags can keep track of not only the song titles and the performer information, but also the album artist, composer, genre, and other information. WAV files don't have "tags;" they only contain the digital music, itself.
As far as I know, the only way you get song and artist information with WAV files is if the program you use creates a separate text file associated with the wav file, which keeps track of it for you on the side. (Like Nero does). Then only that program can use that data info. It is conceivable that the program you use will then transfer this side data to the MP3 tags, but it probably will omit certain tags (like genre, composer, and album artist), and only give you song and singer information. Moreover, again, I don't know why you would want to go to this completely unnecessary extra step.
Absent your WAV software keeping track of the data for you, I don't know of anything that links WAV files up to the music datasbases. Music on CDs are not in WAV format, they are in something like CDAC. I am not sure, but I think you would need to re-burn it onto a CD in CDAC (or whatever digital format is on CDs) to link back up to the CBBD database.