SOUND FLIPPER GUIDES
Audio tags and cover art: what to preserve
Separate audio fidelity from metadata, review common music fields, and check the destination before assuming every tag will survive.
By Singularity Shift Ltd · Updated · Preview guide
Metadata travels beside the audio
Title, artist, album, track and disc numbers help a player organise music. Cover art gives it a picture. These fields do not improve the sample data, but losing them can make a carefully organised library inconvenient to use. Conversely, an audio file can sound correct while its tags are missing or wrong.
Private comments, device identifiers and creator names can also be embedded. Before sharing a file, consider both its visible filename and the fields inside it. Removing source tags does not make the voice or other audible content anonymous.
Common fields are not a complete archive
Different containers use different tagging systems. MP3 commonly uses ID3, M4A uses its own metadata structures, and FLAC/Vorbis use comment fields. WAV and AIFF have less consistent support across players. A destination may support a title but ignore album artist or a picture. A converter cannot guarantee how every player will display a valid field.
Sound Flipper distinguishes common music metadata from arbitrary archival fields. Read the per-result warnings and inspect the saved file in the destination app. Do not interpret common-tag preservation as preservation of chapters, private frames, recording-device details or every custom field.
A careful round-trip check
Use a nonprivate test recording with an obvious title, artist, album and track number. Add a modest JPEG or PNG cover image you own. Convert a copy, then open the result in your player and compare the expected fields. Check the artwork dimensions and appearance as well as whether a picture exists. For a library delivery copy, try FLAC to MP3 while retaining the FLAC master.
Keep a written list of the fields that matter to your archive. A matching audio checksum does not test tags, and a visible cover image does not test sample accuracy. These are separate acceptance checks. The FLAC FAQ explains why FLAC metadata and arbitrary WAV chunks are not interchangeable.
Use the preview's explicit choice
The current converter exposes metadata controls and destination-specific warnings. Choose removal when you do not want source fields carried into the output. If the selected path does not support a field, keep the original and treat the omission as an intentional boundary, not a complete archival copy. Artwork is bounded to prevent a huge or malformed image from dominating an audio conversion.
Generated encoder or container fields may remain even when source tags are removed. A byte-for-byte original option, where available, retains the original metadata too. Editing or removing a tag and making a truly unchanged copy are different actions.
When a cover is kept, its JPEG or PNG bytes are preserved as supplied, including any metadata inside the image itself. Remove the cover if you do not want that image data carried into the output.
Report a useful metadata issue
Tell us the input and output formats, the field name, the app that displays it and the warning you saw. Use invented tag values in a reproducible example rather than sending private recordings. See privacy information and contact details. Check current format boundaries before a large library conversion.