I want to archive my CD collection (classical music) and later use a squeezebox server or equivalent system to listen to the audio files (FLAC format). For volume (mobile) and/or hardware incompatibility reasons (car audio), i might have to convert flac files in mp3 ones.

So i discover, day after day, the (many) tagging problems and the interest of a good tag editor such mp3tag.

I have seen that FLAC supports only Vorbis Comments; so i searched for standards but i found only :
- a small old official list of 15 tags ( http://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html )
- a proposal to extend this list with some additional tags ( http://wiki.xiph.org/Field_names )
- and some unauthoritative proposals which were used to give the last i mentioned above (see the excel spreadsheet in the precedent link or http://age.hobba.nl/audio/mirroredpages/ogg-tagging.html and http://gophernet.org/articles/vorbiscomment/)

1) am i missing something ? is it possible to have only 15 official tags for Vorbis Comments?

2) Is the extension proposal official or considered as official?

3) Among the listed proposals (or others existing ones), which is followed by the main products ?

At this point of my investigations, i wonder if Vorbis Comments compatibility is not simply an utopia (and sure a nightmare for editors and users) due to this lack of standards.

So if compatibility is very hypothetic, i need to find a set of audio products that work well together and keep them.
I use dbpoweramp/EAC to rip my CD and retrieve the basic tags
I have THE tag editor : mp3tag
I need :
- a conversion tool that converts FLAC files tagged with mp3tag to mp3 ones, if possible keeping tags : dbpoweramp ? other ?
- an intuitive player that manages well FLAC files tagged with mp3tag: MediaMonkey ? JRiver ? MusicBee ? other ? (if possible, supporting multiple tags with the same name according to Vorbis recommendation)

which feedback could you give me for these questions?

Thanks a lot for your help!

You can use the LAME encoder to convert FLAC to MP3.
If you are not so familiar with the commandline and how to apply a commandline tool, then you can use e. g. foobar2000 as an user interface to LAME.EXE.
You can convert a FLAC file to MP3 file without attention to the tag-fields within the FLAC file in the first step.
In the second step you can use Mp3tag to copy the entire set of tag-fields from the FLAC file to the MP3 file using the Mp3tag clipboard.
This works even for multiple files at once.
Both sets of filetypes should be loaded groupwise into the Mp3tag list view and each set must have the same order of files to ensure the correct relation between the involved files.

DD.20110813.2047.CEST

I believe that FLAC tags can contain more than 15 fields, but can't confirm as I don't use more than this. DBPOWERAMP is excellent for converting FLAC to mp3. I rip with dbpa to FLAC, make sure my tags and art are exactly what I want, then I create a mirror version of mp3 files from the FLAC archive (this just takes a couple of clicks for large batches of files (thousands) and everything, including art, copies over appropriately, including all tag info,). I use the FLAC in my SB system and the mp3 for my ipods/iphones.

Classical tagging is always more complicated. See some of these threads, for example:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.p...assical+tagging
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.p...ging&page=2

search the forums at slim devices on "classical tag" for lots of useful ideas.

edit: for my computer and files, I really like foobar2000 with the facets add-on. Otherwise, I'm using SqueezeBoxServer for my database/player as my home system is all SB players.

You found almost all the proposals. Did you searched hydrogenaudio.org as well? ... There is no real standard. IMHO the squeezebox is the best solution (e.g. less pain compared to others) for the desired purpose, than, I would go to http://forums.slimdevices.com/ and check how do the folks tag classical music, which fields work well, which not.


foobar2000 (foobar2000.org) is a free player, uses the same titleformat reference as MP3Tag (precisely: MP3Tag uses the same titleformat as foobar), works very well with FLAC and can be used to convert into various formats (IIRC you have to provide lame.exe to encode MP3; you'll find it easily in the www).

(With foobar there's no limit in tag fields. You can use whatever you like [including multivalue] ... however, your mobile devices or the squeezebox might support only a limited number of tag fields.)