Convert WAV to FLAC while preserving tags

Question

Is there a command utility that can convert between various audio formats (or more specifically from wav to flac) while preserving tags? Or an utility that can copy tags from one audio file to another?

There are various tags, not just track name and artist. There are also custom tags (i.e. tags with custom names not commonly found in tag databases).

Tags are generated by different tools and every tool saves tags in different formats. Some tools just make a "LIST" chunk with type "INFO". Other tools also make an "ID3 " or "id3 " chunk with ID3v2 tags inside. Other tools just stick ID3v2 tags to the end of the file without even making a RIFF chunk.

Answer 1

The standard flac command will perform the re-encoding step:

flac some.wav -o some.flac

For tagging, Kid3 provides a command-line interface, and recognizes tags in WAV files. kid3-cli has its own interactive command interpreter, so to copy tags from one file to another, you could use:

$ kid3-cli
kid3-cli> select some.wav
kid3-cli> copy
kid3-cli> select some.flac
kid3-cli> paste
kid3-cli> save
kid3-cli> exit
$

To use it in a truly command-line, non-interactive manner, such as in a script, you can instead provide each of those steps as a separate -c argument:

kid3-cli -c 'select some.wav' -c copy -c 'select some.flac' -c paste

(The save step is done automatically when providing commands with -c.)

Answer 2

Here is how I approached the same problem in Windows:

1. Download and install FLAC (of course)
2. Download and install Kid3
3. Write a foreach loop using the command shell of your choice

   For each ($SRC in $DIR)
     flac $SRC.wav -f --tag="NSTDtag=NSTDvalue"
     kid3-cli.exe -c "select $SRC.wav" -c "copy" -c "select $SRC.flac" -c "paste"
   DONE!
   

Note: For nonstandard tags, you have to get flac to put them in (--tag="NSTDtag=NSTDvalue"); kid3 blows up if it has to write non-standard tags.

Note: Implementation details depend on the environment/shell you are working with

Note: kid3-cli even copies "Picture" tags without a hitch