Thank you for the excellent responses! I do have the full version of dbpoweramp. Zd542 you are exactly right in what I am seeing. The file in which my music is stored and the way windows media player contains the info is very different and it does drive me crazy. WMP has a lot of music in an unknown folder. It is confusing.
My plan will probably be to move to an Apple Mac mini with attached additional memory, connected asynchronously via usb to my DAC as a front end, using wav files.
Right now I stream from a laptop wirelessly to a Pioneer N50 which connects via optical to my Esoteric DAC. The sound quality is very good but selection of music (via N50 smartphone app) is best through the music file rather than through WMP, because of the problems above, which is not ideal.
I suppose I am really most concerned that by ripping to wav I have lost tags? If I convert to Flac or another format using Dbpoweramp, will any lost tags be recovered? Will the mess in WMP be cleared up with Flac vs wav? I also want to use other formats for the car and ipod etc. (btw - I have made no manual tag corrections)
My plan will probably be to move to an Apple Mac mini with attached additional memory, connected asynchronously via usb to my DAC as a front end, using wav files.
Right now I stream from a laptop wirelessly to a Pioneer N50 which connects via optical to my Esoteric DAC. The sound quality is very good but selection of music (via N50 smartphone app) is best through the music file rather than through WMP, because of the problems above, which is not ideal.
I suppose I am really most concerned that by ripping to wav I have lost tags? If I convert to Flac or another format using Dbpoweramp, will any lost tags be recovered? Will the mess in WMP be cleared up with Flac vs wav? I also want to use other formats for the car and ipod etc. (btw - I have made no manual tag corrections)