I just bought a PhotoBridge HD-1000. Up to this point I have been playing my 300 CD’s worth of Wave files through an AudioTron digital player. They were encoded with “WavTag” tag information (this is a proprietary tagging system for AudioTron) and they are in a file hierarchy Artist/ Album/ Song.

I have been wanting to convert all of my wave files to FLAC lossless with id3 tags. I bought the HD-1000 because it reportedly will play FLAC files.

Here are my questions:

1) Will the PB play the wave files and navigate through them with just the file structure that I am using? (This is only until I am set up with FLAC)

2) Could someone explain to me step-by-step how to set up the PB for FLAC with id3 tags? I am a total newbie in regards to the PB!

3) Does anyone have any experience with converting wave to FLAC? My hope is to also preserve the tag info and convert the WavTag to id3 in the process. Or at least create the id3 info from the file structure. I have spent some time with various converters and have not found a straightforward method so far. Obviously with so many files I need to set up batch conversion for everything.

Any help would be most appreciated!

Thanks,
John

August wrote:

1) Will the PB play the wave files and navigate through them with just the file structure that I am using? (This is only until I am set up with FLAC)

Yes, the default music application will work fine with this setup.

August wrote:

I have been wanting to convert all of my wave files to FLAC lossless with id3 tags. I bought the HD-1000 because it reportedly will play FLAC files.

Yes, there is a 3rd party codec available to play FLAC (as well as WavPack).
However the first thing you will need to do is upgrade the firmware on your PhotoBridge. The HD1000 comes with 1.5.18 installed, this is quite old and missing a number of features, including the ability to support 3rd party codecs.
You'll need a compact flash card in order to upgrade your firmware.

http://www.rokulabs.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5053

This posting gives a link to download version 2.0.36 of the firmware (the current latest), you would download the file formatup.rok to your PC, put this file on a compact flash card and place the card in the HD1000. Hold the power button on the unit down for at least 5 seconds (till you see the light flashing) and then wait several minutes while the HD1000 upgrades. After its finished upgrading make sure to remove the formatup.rok file from the compact flash card.

At this stage you should be running 2.0.36 and able to support 3rd party sound codecs.

The FLAC codec can be downloaded via this post

http://www.rokulabs.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2546

Instructions to install are in here also.

For bulk transcoding/conversion I would use dBpowerAMP

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

specifically the dMC File Selector tool within dBpoweramp Music Converter application.

This can convert your files and keep the directory structure intact.

For bulk tag renaming I personally use MP3Tag

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

using the "Convert -> Filename - Tag" option and a format string something like

%artist%\%album%\%track% %title%

This has a preview feature so you can test/see what the resultant tags would be.

FLAC files use an ID tagging system called Vorbis Comments (also called FLAC tags). The default music application does not support this tagging system, but you'll still be able to play the music fine (once you have the FLAC codec installed obviously).
However there is an application for the HD1000 that does support FLAC tags, this is called Sonica.

http://www.bobsplace.com/sonica/

The default music application (called Listen or Sonata) only supports ID3 tags, which is what MP3 files use. However, the lossless codec WavPack can also support ID3 tags (as well as its main tagging format which is called APEv2). I'm just mentioning WavPack as its an excellent lossless codec also, see here for more info if you've never heard of it.

http://www.wavpack.com

I know this is a lot of information to get through, but hopefully this should get you started.

soiaf - Thank you very much! This should keep me busy for awhile. I'll let you know how it goes.

John

Hi Bob,

Do you know if it's possible to use ID3 tags on wavpack files with dbpoweramp or any other converter application?

Thanks in advance,

Chewy

Chewy wrote:

Do you know if it's possible to use ID3 tags on wavpack files with dbpoweramp or any other converter application?

I think dBpowerAMP only writes the APEv2 tags (say if you were converting from FLAC to WavPack). I don't know about other conversion applications.
I know that MP3Tag can add the ID3 tags to a WavPack file though (either based on the APEv2 tag or based on the filename etc.).

One particular reason why I mentioned WavPack to August is that WavPack compresses the entire WAV file (including the extra WAV chunks containing the WavTag information) while FLAC just compresses the audio part of the WAV file. Both are obviously lossless from an audio perspective, however WavPack would allow the WavTag information to be retained if he ever found an application that could make use of it.
WavPack also has the advantage of supporting ID3v1 tags of course.
Saying that of course FLAC does have more 'popular' support (i.e. software applications, user base etc.).