Aiff and Wav tagging now available

SongKong now supports reading and writing metadata to Aiff and Wav formats !

AIFF and WAV formats each provide an uncompressed lossless format for your audio, whereas Flac and Apple Lossless provide a compressed lossless format. Both types can encode your audio without losing any of the original data. An uncompressed format does not need to be uncompressed during playback, which can potentially result in smoother playback but at the expense of larger file sizes, however with most hardware it is unlikely you could detect any difference in playback . To confuse matters a little it is now possible to store compressed lossless in Aiff and Wav files as well - but this is rarer and not part of the original specification.

Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) was developed by Apple Inc. in 1988 and is most commonly used on Apple Mac systems. Waveform Audio File Format (WAV) is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs developed in 1991. Both are version of the Interchange File Format (IFF) format developed by Electronic Arts back in 1985.

All formats provide a way of storing data in chunks - however until recently there was no agreed way to store anything but the bare minimum of metadata, this is why we never added support within Jaikoz. The other reason was these formats were expected to die out and be replaced with newer formats but although they are less prevalent then before this has not happened.

However we revisited this and discovered that defacto support for aiff tagging and wav tagging now existed using an ID3v2 chunk, just like MP3 files. Because they use ID3v2 they can now store all the metadata that SongKong finds such as artwork, composers, bpm and  MusicBrainz and Discogs identifiers - not just the basic metadata such as artist and album. Wavs can store metadata in an ID3v2 chunk and also some basic metadata in an INFO chunk: for maximum compatibility with older applications SongKong adds both an ID3v2 and a INFO chunk to files when they are saved.

After a period of development and testing support has now been added to SongKong 3.18 and this is available from today, plus as usual we have some matching improvements and some additional fixes.

Support for these new formats will be added to Jaikoz within a few weeks.