Hi - I am not only new to this forum, but have only received my new DDJ-400 today, so I am on a steep learning curve...
Anyway, I have immediately encountered a problem. I suspect the solution is either trivially easy or non-existent. Basically, I already have a lot of music in the form of WAV files, but the tag information on many of them is irrelevant e.g. title: Track 6, artist: Unknown artist, Album: Unknown album etc.
This means that when I load a track, it just comes up as Track 6 (or whatever). All of my files have meaningful filenames, and I don't care whether the metadata is correct. All I need to be able to do is to get rekordbox to display the filename instead of the metadata of artist, track name etc. when I load it onto a deck, but I can't work out if there is a way to do it.
Can anyone help?
WAV files don't really have a metadata section the same way an MP3 does (well, they do, but it's non-standardized, and many don't even store the data in there).
My recommendation would be to use a software utility to bulk-process your music and convert the filename information into the metadata, then within rekordbox, re-load the metadata for those songs so you don't have to manually re-enter it.
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So does that mean there ISN'T an option to display the filename?
For some years I have been confused about metadata within WAV files. Originally I thought they couldn't contain any, and indeed my older WAV files don't have any. Funnily enough Rekordbox actually seems to deal with these better, as it seems to automatically copy the filename into the track name field, which is then displayed on the deck when it's loaded.
But for my more recent WAVs, I had this issue where when I ripped files from a CD, it would add the metadata I described e.g. Track 1, Unknown artist etc. This caused me a problem with Windows Media Player, which would display this metadata instead of the filename. So I used a batch process in a wave editor software to load and re-save these files, and that seemed to work for Windows Media Player. However, now when I load these re-saved files into Rekordbox, that old metadata re-appears, so it seems it was never properly removed!!! Very strange - possibly it's stored in two locations within the WAV file and my method only removed one of them. Can you (or anyone) shed any light on this?
Anyway, thanks for the suggestion - can you recommend a utility that could do this bulk processing?
@Darrel > You can enable the FILENAME column in the collection view, but that won't show any more information in the player than what you're already seeing. If you were to add the data to the other fields, it would be more useful.
You're on a PC, so I'll suggest my favourite media manager -- Tag & Rename. It's so good, I wish they had it on Mac!
The batch process you're describing may have done something else to the files, and the "metadata" on a WAV is a bit of a complicated situation.
Thanks, yes I had already enabled the filename column, but once you have searched for the subsequent track and loaded it, there seems to be no obvious way to see what the previously selected track was, so at that point all I have is two decks loaded with e.g. Track 2 and Track 5, which is not very helpful.
Luckily for me, yes I am using a PC. Although without getting into a Mac vs PC debate, let's just say that I have serious misgivings about BOTH, for a variety of reasons! I mean, for many tasks my Windows 10 computer is slower than the Windows 3.1 machine I had in 1993. How is that progress??? (no, don't answer that...)
Thanks, I will try the Tag & Rename you suggested.
UPDATE:
I have just downloaded and been trying out the free trial version of Tag & Rename, and so far it seems to be working very well - stripping out all of the existing tags and then creating new artist/title tags from my filenames. It's not perfect - it seems to have problems with some characters e.g. accented letters, punctuation etc., but for the most part seems to be working well. Thanks very much!
I think I'll actually buy the full version, because it's such a handy tool. Just being able to strip out the old tags is great, but creating batches to automatically generate new tags means I can now also sort/search by artist etc. which is a huge bonus! I'm so glad I've been consistent with my file naming method - I always thought it might come in handy one day!