Metadata in .wav

[King Burton]

Saving in .mp3 allows the input of metadata.  Is there no way to do this for a .wav?

[William W. Saunders, Jr.]

I believe you can do it in Audacity, which is free.   I tag  waves with it before burning  CDs. 

https://www.audacityteam.org/

 

Edited November 16, 2021 by William W. Saunders, Jr.

[John Vere]

I think all the Wave editors might do this. But for sure I can burn a CD with Nero and my Album and song names shows on my car stereo and one of my ghetto blasters. Cakewalk isn’t much of a mastering software but it’s slowly getting there. 

[bitflipper]

You can't put a lot of metadata into a standard wav file because the file spec it's based on (RIFF) simply doesn't provide any standardized place to put it. That's why most of that kind of information is handled at the host level, e.g. a CD's TOC or a DAW's project file.

Mostly all you get in a standard wave file are essential technical information such as sample rate, word length, interleave and number of channels. Yes, the standard is extensible and can even contain ID3v2 tags, but such variants are not universal and can be problematic. Think about how many times users have come here for advice because they inadvertently imported a BWF (a RIFF-based format that does support metadata) and were confused when it didn't behave like the WAV file they assumed it was. 

MP3 and similar formats, OTOH, were designed specifically to have self-contained, portable metadata to facilitate music distribution. Consequently, there is almost no limit to what kinds of information they can contain. Even then, not all fields will be meaningful to all applications.

Bottom line is that it's not an oversight in the DAW that prohibits you from entering metadata for a wav file. If an application does provide such features, it's probably writing a nonstandard format that other applications may not understand. The wave files that Cakewalk writes, however, can be read by any DAW and most players, making it possible to collaborate across different DAWs and platforms. As long as you stick to widely-used formats, anyway.

Here's a reference that might help. It lists applications that can write ID3v2 tags to wave files. My longtime go-to for things like that are the free foobar2000. This is a very useful tool to have on hand.