"How could windows media player read the meta data of my itunes ripped wav files? help, classification has disappeared!"

Both have free versions of with blow away the 2 you are using. MM may be a bit better for handling complex metadata. The structure of its database allows for CDs with multiple artist and other challanging senerios.

I would not use these to rip CDs. Use the best rippers/encoders since they make your music. As you listen to music you get more picky. Picking your tools wisely will save you the effort of redoing all your work a second time correctly.

The last time I checked, wave files did not contain metadata. Then the last time I checked itunes did not rip to wave. I can't think of a more useless format unless you are editing the file. They take up a good deal of space because they are not compressed. If you must go lossless Ape probably uses the best compression with Flac next. I never checked out Apple lossless since their AAC is defective but is widely acclaimed. For that I do not trust Apple at all. They are all hype and no substance that I can see. If I have the CDs I do not archive to lossless. I rip using the V0 quality setting and the slow careful analysis setting for LAME VBRs. That creates a perfect audio copy but not a perfect copy. What I mean by this is no human being can hear the difference. Most of the data on a CD can not be heard by humans. If you do not have the original CDs, ripping to lossless is a means for making a perfect copy as long as you use the right ripper. I archive lossless copies of vinyl audio captures. So, I am not saying lossless is useless.

I will add a few theads for additional reading. One will contain a link for a compliant thread where you can post a problem with a LAME VRB mp3. You will need to fully document the defect and they will fix the problem. There hasn't been a posting to that thread in over 2 years. Anyone claiming to be able to hear the difference might be under a dilusion.

Further reading on a more serious audio forum...
--LAME artifact posting if you can hear a difference you post it hear to get the problem resolved.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=39313

It sounds like that's the only data the player found in the files.
WAV sucks for metadata.
Speaking for myself only.
See http://zachd.com/pss/pss.html for some helpful WMP info.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Playing iTunes .m4a files in Windows media player
Fri, 07/09/2007
stuart

As part of setting up my Vista PC I decided to overhaul my music library. I wanted to sync things in to my iPod, but I had most of my stuff ripped as WMA files. That means iTunes wants to convert everything to its own format, so I get two copies of everything.

iTunes native format is .m4a, which won't play in WMA, so to have the choice of WMP or iTunes means having everything twice (and I quite like the new media player in Vista).

I'm trying out a combination of two programs that seem to make it work. Firstly, a codec from 3ivx. That adds the necessary code to allow Windows media player handle the iTunes mpeg format. There are various packages, but if you go to the 3ivx store you can use the which version is right for you section to get the personal download and it's only a few dollars. There are more comprehensive packages if you want to encode too, but for playback just the personal version is fine.

Having installed it WMP can then play iTunes files (and will start adding them to the library too). However, it doesn't let WMP read the tag data, so the files just get displayed with their filename.

A second piece of software, WMP Tag Support Extender fixes this. From what I've seen so far it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. It probably gets about 90% of the info right. Enough that it's not been too much of a problem so far to fix the duff entries.

I'm not sure how good it would be at handling an existing library, but it's fine for picking up CDs as I rip them or download new iTunes stuff. There are usually only a couple of entries where it doesn't get it quite right. The only "downside" is that when you view a folder containing iTunes music with Windows Explorer you don't see the artist/album info because the plug in only lets media player see the meta-data. It doesn't expose it to Explorer, but that's not too much of a hardship!

The advantage is that I now have one folder that contains all my audio files, and I can sync them to my iPod, play them in iTunes, or in WMP.

I found other references on the web that mentioned MusicBridge, a program that synchronises iTunes and Media Player. Maybe that's an option (instead of? or as well as WMPTSE?) I need to explore too :-)