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I've not seen any discussion re tagging of files and was wondering whether it's something you pay a lot of attention to or something you leave to your ripping software? If it's something you pay attention to, what do you use to do your tagging and what metadata source do you use. My collection is pretty large and for me it's important to be able to 1) easily identify all albums/ tracks an artist appears on across my library; 2) selectively browse my library using genres, mood and/or year of release and 3) have decent cover art available to my tablets when browsing my library. For these reasons I'm pretty particular when it comes to tagging. Being a long-time Linux user puddletag is my tagger of choice. If you're familiar with mp3tag then you'll feel right at home, it does masstagging and supports musicbrainz, acoustid, discogs, Amazon and freedb metadata sources. In the example below I'll see the track under Stevie Nicks as well as Tom Petty and it'd be a candidate for random playback if I selected one or more of the genres associated with the track when setting up the random play. Makes for pretty easy automated playlisting when having friends around for dinner, BBQ etc.

Hi all I need to rip approx 900 CDs (all standard Redbook) on a Mac Mini Server running Yosemite OSX. I intend to rip to FLAC. Interested to hear from Mac users about what ripping and tagging software they use. I was leaning towards dbpoweramp but the artwork, metadata and accuracy-check app - PerfectTunes - is Windows only. Is this a deal-breaker? What are my other options? Opinions on XLD? Playback might deserve its own thread but if you want to share opinions there too I'm all ears. Keen to give iTunes a miss (because FLAC). Audirvana Plus? Sorry if these questions have been asked before - I did search the forum first, but please feel free to direct me to older topics. Cheers, Dylan/Art

So late last week I ripped a couple of thousand songs to my laptop. Rightly or wrongly I used iTunes for this task. Not wanting to be locked into all things apple I chose the only non-apple lossless format available - WAV. As it turns out this wasn't a great decision as WAV appears to be next to useless as far as tagging goes. I now have all of the ripped songs listed under the one unknown album by an unknown artist. iTunes itself has them categorised correctly (a little google search has explained why that is). The use of these songs is temporary until a dedicated server solution was determined but fell into the following two categories streaming over home network to Smart TV or PVR (tv seems to be a lot more robust) loading onto phone and/or ipod for mobile music. My questions are: Do i need to redo the ripping? iTunes can apparently do a conversion of sorts but it isn't clear if the converted file will be tagged appropriately and each song will be duplicated instead of replaced What program, if any, would people recommend for performing the conversion outside of iTunes is it possible at all to convert WAV's to another format and have the tagging from the original retained? At this stage i'm only really after title, artist, album, genre Should i be looking at a particular lossless format to ensure compatibility with multiple devices in future and if so what? Should i just create a lossy version of the ripped songs until such time as i have a complete, long term digital solution? questions 1-3 would still need to be resolved Any help appreciated