Winamp allows you to store artwork in the same folder as the accompaying music file and that’s nice if you want to keep total control over your library, and it allows you copying directories across easily while maintaining the artwork for each file. For instance iTunes stores the artwork separately from the music files in a way that doesn’t allow you to copy them over easily. What’s more: artwork can be stored in such a way that it is either a pain to retrieve or even impossible. For instance, an imported iTunes library in Winamp only works as long as you don’t use a setting that makes it actively scan its music library folders. Some programs can import an iTunes library but that doesn’t always work well. What’s also potentially very troublesome is when you want to move your entire library to another computer and perhaps also want to use another player. Winamp isn’t much better either in this respect. You will end up with a wav file that only has the song title as a filename.
You can’t just select one track in its root directory, copy it over and expect the database to come along. With iTunes it’s still no problem, as long as you conform to the way that the program wants you to work, which can have you jumping through loops, but at least with compatible hardware (and that mostly means Apple made stuff), the tags will go along. So far it’s all sunny right? Who cares about tagging when it works well with a library? Well, the trouble starts once you want to copy those wav files to other locations or computers. Winamp requires the user to set its own parameters and that can be confusing, but once setup, it works precisely the way you want it to. iTunes is a bit too clever this way sometimes, but when it works, it works well.
Many programs (iTunes and Winamp included) are even so clever that they can deduct Artist, Album and Song from the way that the folders are located within each other. What happens is that the playback application maintains its own database in which it associates any particular wav file with fields like Artist, Song, Album etcetera. And indeed, it may seem so, as long as you use the audiofiles within the program that they were created with, or imported into. Many people are under the impression that WAV tagging works just fine even if it really doesn’t. to date, iTunes, Winamp and various other popular programs don’t support WAV tagging (2014). There are programs that allow you to investigate and even edit tags for wav files, such as dBpoweramp, JRiver Media Center and JRiver Media Jukebox and Audioshell, but even if you succeed in adding tags using these apps, they won’t be read by many of the other available playback apps. The WAV format has always allowed a limited form of tagging, but this wasn’t as elaborate as the tagging used for mp3 and FLAC because it was never intended to be used that way. WAV or AIFF files may appear to have tags when they are accessed through applications such as iTunes and Winamp, but in fact the data may only reside in these apps’ database, because they don’t actually write tags to these files themselves.
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