computer music file portability (or not).

This is something I've never got my head around and am hoping there's a relatively straightforward answer - though I don't quite know what question it is that I'm asking.

If I have a jpeg I can move it around from drive to drive, open it where I like and afaik it will keep it's camera data with it along the way as well.

Some music files seem to work like this but very soon you get into absolute filepaths and syncing drives and so on.

.wav files are pretty basic, add a cue sheet and you have the ability to replicate a CD and also move the file around as much as you like. But as has been highlighted in another thread, there's no scope for tagging. Except that iTunes will let you add tags but as separate files, to an extent that file is then less portable. Move it and you lose the tags.

I'm assuming the issue is not with the files themselves (otherwise I couldn't buy eg. a FLAC file) but how those files are associated with particular programs

The upshot of this is that I come back to EAC/Foobar/.wav/Explorer as the most easily graspable version of the computer audio thing.

 

Not really, - it's down to the design of the file format.

e.g. AIFF's have tags built into the format, so the tags are carried with the file when you move or copy it. Wavs have no tag facility in the file format, so have to be added in a separate file.

It's the separate tag files which are associated with the particular programs which generated them.

JC.

 

So with a tagged format like FLAC you need a program to edit those tags - it's a format where the tag is 'built in'.
(Just twigged that AIFF must be to TIFF what mp3 (mpeg) is to jpeg).

Then you have separate tag files which you describe above which are program specific.

But what are the issues with file names themselves?

With wavs, do cue sheets rely on the fact that the file names remain the same?

Or if I change the name of the folder that contains the individual FLAC tracks that make up the album, does it make no difference to anything except a program that has already indexed it?

Really basic stuff I know but I think one of the divides between PC and Mac (as someone who has used both) is the way that Macs tend to hide everything you don't need to know about and PCs tend to show you stuff you wish you didn't have to know about.
This has changed a lot from about XP onwards but I still have a hankering to know where things are, what they are called, and whether I can rename and move them at will.