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[Chris_M]

I have ripped a bunch of songs from my discs into MJ. I have, in MJ, added info on artist, album title, genre, comments, etc. to each one (my main computer, the one I have MJ on, is not hooked up to the Internet, so I can't use that cddb online thing or whatever it is). How can I re-save these song files so that the information I entered is saved as tags in the file itself, so that if I take them to work and import them there I'll have all the same info already in place?

--Chris M.

[Cmagic]

Hi Chris-M,

If your files are MP3, make sure the option "Update tags when file info change"
in Options/Settings/General is set.
If you run MJ8.0 go in Settings/Plug in manager/Input/MP3 Plugin/Configure and make sure both id3v1 and id3v2 are in the "Save" mode.

That way when editing file properties (right click/Properties..) the following
properties will be saved as standard mp3 file tags (decent mp3 player can read them) :
Track name, artist, album, comment, genre, year, track num, Notes, Lyrics, copyright etc..
The following properties will be saved in a custom MJ tag (only MJ can read it back !) : Rating, album artist, custom fields
In short don't worry MJ will save your properties in mp3 tags by default.

hope this helps.

[Chris_M]

Thanks for the reply. I think that solves that problem, but as it turns out I'm confused on more than I thought! (BTW, as a kid growing up in Michigan, we used a wood burning stove to heat our house. I'm not sure why, but that seems to be important around here.)

Anyway, let me explain what I'm trying to do. I had a collection of old LPs, some of which were burned onto CD a few years ago by a friend. Since then the LPs died in a fire at my mom's place (just the storage building, fortunately -- not fortunate for my record or baseball card collections though). I want to add these tunes to my computer collection so I can burn them onto new mixes. No problem so far because I can import them into MJ and have done so. But now I'd like to clean them up in Magix Audio Cleaning Lab, which I purchased based on positive reviews I read here. I asked about the tags earlier, because I want to make sure my tags, since I took the time to enter them, survive the trip from MJ to Audio Cleaning Lab and back again.

Here's my problem(s): First, I can't find how to read the tags in ACL after I've imported the files. Second, ACL won't let me save them as MP3s because they were saved as WMA files when I imported them into MJ. I don't want my files in the WMA format because I hate Microsoft. So my question is, how can I set up MJ so that it imports my tunes as MP3 files and not WMA files? (Also, if anyone is familiar with ACL, why won't it save WMA files back out as MP3s? And how do I read/edit tags in ACL?)

--Chris M.

[JimH]

When you rip, you have some options.  Choose mp3 for encoding.  APE is even better but requires a lot of disk space.  APE is exactly what you get from a CD.  It's lossless encoding.

You might want to check the Help in version 8.

[Cmagic]

Hi,

I don't know about Magix Audio Clinic Lab (ACL)  but I assume
it's a kind of wave editor program (I use Cool Edit Pro).
One thing is when you want to clean some recording to remove clicks'n pops
or to trim the tracks you should always do this on the original waveform.
To do that with MJ you should first Rip to an uncompressed format
(set the encoder option to Uncompressed wave is safer). You'll get a large .wav
file that you can load in your wave cleaning software.
When your work is done in ACL you should be able to use a "Save as..." command and
choose the encoding format you like (WMA, MP3...).
If you can't save in MP3 from within ACL it probably means that you need some sort
of encoding plugin (same for Cool Edit). In that case don't worry save your work in
.wav format and use MJ to encode to MP3.
(Import your .wav in MJ and select Tools/Convert Format)

>>how can I set up MJ so that it imports my tunes as MP3 files and not WMA files?
MJ will import your tunes in the format they are encoded. You can't import a .wma file
as an .mp3 file. What you can do is to convert from one format to another (transcode).
It is perfectly possible to convert a wma file to an mp3 file with MJ but this will result
in a loss of quality so this is not advisable.
In short converting between lossy formats is dangerous but converting from a loseless
format to a lossy one will alway be ok. That's why I started by saying that you should do your
wave cleaning on plain wave file (.wav is a loseless/uncompressed format)

A short taxonomy of music file formats :
Uncompressed/loseless(of course ! ) : Wave (.wav) Raw (.raw)
Compressed/loseless : APE (.ape, .apl)
Compressed/lossy : MP3 (.mp3), WMA (.wma), Musepack (.mpc), Ogg/vorbis (.ogg)

Now about tags: I think, but this would require a test, that MJ convert tool also
copy the file properties at least for the basic ones (artist, genre, etc..)

Voila, hope all this is not too confusing !

Have fun !