Music players that support WAV tags
February 16, 2016 in digital music by Dan Gravell
We've established that WAV tagging has come a long way in the past year or so. After an upswell of interest from the audiophile community, more and more tagging software are beginning to support the tagging of WAV files. But more importantly, more and more music players are supporting WAV metadata too.
So I was pondering the question: now that we can add all this rich metadata to WAV files, what are the music players that will display all those lovely tags?
It's important to understand is that there are two main approaches to tagging WAVs, and neither are particularly compatible with each other. Music players must read one or the other, or both. The first approach is to use the RIFF INFO chunk, which is the way WAVs were designed to be tagged. However, this doesn't allow for as rich a data schema, so techniques have developed to add ID3v2 tags into WAV files. This allows embedded artwork within WAVs. bliss favours the latter.
So, I've done a bit of research and listed all music players that support WAV tagging, with whether they support RIFF INFO or ID3v2, or both! Where I'm not sure, I've left the cell blank. "Support" means all of album name, artist name, track number and track name are supported. Please let me know of any updates to these tables!
| Desktop software | ||
|---|---|---|
| Music player | RIFF? | ID3v2? |
| Clementine | ✔ | |
| foobar2000 | ✔ | ✔ |
| JRiver Media Center | ✔ | |
| MediaMonkey | ✔ | ✘ |
| VLC Media Player | ✔ | |
| XMPlay | ✔ | ✔ |
| Music servers/systems | ||
|---|---|---|
| Server | RIFF? | ID3v2? |
| Auralic Aries | ✔ | |
| Bluesound | ✔ | |
| Cambridge Audio | ✔ | |
| Logitech Media Server | ✘ | ✔ |
| Sonos | ✔ | ✘ |
| UPnP servers | ||
|---|---|---|
| Server | RIFF? | ID3v2? |
| Asset | ✔ | ✔ |
| MinimServer | ✘ | ✔ |
| Twonky | ✔ | ✘ |
Do you know any other music players, hardware, software, server, NAS, whatever, that supports WAV tagging? Are there any updates to support to the above list? Let me know in the comments or via email!
Thanks to Jon Grado for the image above.
