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lariva
6th June 2008, 16:07
I have looked around and could not find any useful data - hopefully someone might have a suggestion.


I have quite a few DD (AC3) and DTS audio files, mostly extracted for DVDs.

What I was looking for is a way to include some metadata along with the files (i.e. mp3 IDv3 tagging and alike). The issue is that AC3 / DTS files have no support for metadata, MP4 cant take ether one (not by spec at least). AVI, i'm trying to stay away from. OGM/OGG - seems like there are (were) some unicode issues in general and the development is a tad slow.

That leaves MKV/MKA which seem to fit the bill, but - there seems to be no support in players for tags (some say that Haali works half way). Also, I could not get the xml tags to work. Mkvmerge says the file has been integrated, mkvextract shows none.

Does anyone have any suggestions on the subject?
In short - my goal is:

1. Avoid re-encode, the format is already lossy and unless I'll use flac the quality will be lost. Also flac at max compression comes up with ~1900 Kbps whereas AC3 6ch is using 448 ...
2. Avoid re-encode as I prefer to use SPDIF to my avr 5800 receiver when at home
3. Have the metadata available - I need a library management , indexing tool that would let me handle 100 gigs worth of music. Obviously I cant even look for a library option until i figure out the format that I could use.

Please help...

unskinnyboy
7th June 2008, 04:53
You could go for any of the lossless formats like Monkey's Audio, WavPack, OptimFROG etc. which support the APEv2 tagging format, but then again, as you might have noted, you might end up with a bigger bitrate and file size than what you started with and also not all players can read those tags. Vorbis's Vorbis Comment was pretty robust from what I remember and does use UTF-8 unicode. What unicode issues were to referring to, exactly? And since you considered Vorbis/OGG, any reason you don't want to consider using the obvious MP3 at a high bitrate (320 kbps VBR)? That would make things quite easier for you, with widespread player support. Matroska is also a good option. See here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122337) for some discussion about Matroska tags.

skromnibog
10th June 2008, 11:47
MPC is lossy.

unskinnyboy
10th June 2008, 13:45
Doh! Yes, stupid typo. Corrected my post. Thanks.