Help / Your library
Tagging DTS, AC-3 and WAV files (.tags sidecars)
Some audio formats have nowhere inside them to put a title, an artist or an album. For those, Vesari Stylus keeps the tags in a small companion file that sits next to the audio and travels with it.
Which formats need a sidecar
Six file types are treated as raw bitstreams: .dts, .dtshd, .ac3, .eac3, .thd and .truehd. Each is an audio stream on its own, with no container around it and so no agreed place to put a tag. Editing one of these tracks never writes into the audio file, because there is nothing to write into.
WAV is a different case
WAV was also defined without a tag area, but a long-standing convention added one: an ID3 chunk, the same sort of tag an MP3 carries. A WAV's tags go inside the WAV itself, and no .tags sidecar is written beside an ordinary one. See Tags will not save to a WAV file.
The exception is a WAV whose audio is really a DTS or AC-3 stream, such as a verbatim DTS audio-CD rip. When you save, the app looks at what is inside the file, not at its name, and treats such a file the way it treats the .dts of the same rip: your text tags are not written into the file, they go to the library and, where the folder allows, to a .tags sidecar beside it. Saving one is a normal save, not a failure.
What the sidecar actually is
A plain UTF-8 JSON text file, sitting in the same folder as the audio and named after the whole audio filename with .tags on the end. Concert.dtshd gets Concert.dtshd.tags, so a.dts and a.dtshd in one folder never fight over the same sidecar.
Inside is a list of tag entries in the shape foobar2000's m-TAGS component uses, with field names from the Vorbis and Picard vocabulary FLAC users will recognise.
| What travels in it | What does not |
|---|---|
TITLE, ARTIST, ALBUMARTIST, ALBUM |
Cover art of any kind |
| Track and disc numbers and totals | Loudness measurements |
DATE, original date, GENRE, COMMENT |
Play counts, favourites, ratings |
| Composer, conductor, work, movement, BPM, key | |
| Label, catalogue number, copyright, lyrics, sort names, MusicBrainz ids |
Each entry also carries an @ field holding the audio file's name with no folder path in it, which keeps the pair matched after a move to a different folder. Keys written by other tagging programs survive a rewrite, and a field you clear in the tag editor is cleared here too. Artwork is not carried, so for these tracks put a cover image in the album folder instead. See Cover art.
How one gets written
- Edit the track and save. Open a raw-bitstream track in the tag editor, change what you need and press Save Tags (Save in the pop-up editor, which opens when you right-click a track and choose Edit Tags). Your library updates and the sidecar is rewritten to match. See The tag editor.
- Backfill in bulk. Library Health carries a card called DTS/AC-3 tag sidecars with a Write .tags button. It walks every raw-bitstream track in your library, writes a sidecar for each one that has something worth writing, then reports how many it wrote out of how many it found, how many had no metadata, and how many failed. It is the quick way to make Super-Tag results portable.
The card counts raw-bitstream tracks whose sidecar has not been written or has gone stale. It does not add to the headline count of tracks needing attention, because nothing here is broken, and once every sidecar it counts is current it shows a tick instead. It covers the six raw-bitstream file types only, so a WAV holding a DTS or AC-3 stream is not counted in it, although Write .tags writes its sidecar too when the card offers the button. Saving that track in the tag editor writes its sidecar as well. See Library Health counts.
Three things catch people out:
- Super-Tag and a MusicBrainz or Discogs match update your library but leave the sidecars stale, so those tracks reappear in the card. Press Write .tags afterwards. A WAV holding a DTS or AC-3 stream does not reappear there, so open it in the Tag Editor tab and press Save Tags to refresh its sidecar. The tab then says Saved to library only, because no text tags go into the audio file, but the
.tagsfile is still written beside it where the folder allows, so check that it is there. Editing several tracks at once in the tag editor also writes each sidecar as it saves, but on Free and during the trial a multi-track save counts toward the allowance for saving tags across more than one track at once (what the free allowance covers); saving one track at a time is always free (Edit Each Track is not that: it begins with a multi-track save). - A track from a CUE sheet is skipped, as it has no file of its own. See CUE sheets.
- In a read-only folder, or when the existing sidecar is not valid JSON, the sidecar write fails quietly into the log rather than failing the save. A sidecar the app cannot read is never overwritten. Your edit is safe in the library, and the card keeps listing the track, if it is one of the six file types.
How it gets read back
- On a scan. When tags cannot be read from the file itself, the sidecar fills whatever the scan has not already established. It is read before any folder-level
.nfo, so per-track detail beats a folder-wide guess. - In the tag editor. Opening one of these tracks reads the sidecar, and any field the sidecar lacks comes from your library. While the sidecar is stale (see above), the fields those edits change come from your library instead, so saving keeps what they applied.
- On import. Import Music copies the
.tagsfile across with the audio, along with any.lrcor.cuebeside it. See Import music.
If the audio moves without it
Treat the .tags file as part of the track.
- Move both together, anywhere. They stay matched, because the sidecar identifies its audio by filename rather than by full path.
- Move or copy the audio on its own. The copy has no tags the app can read, so in a fresh library it lands with no title, artist or album at all, unless it is a WAV holding DTS or AC-3 that carries a tag chunk the app can read. For these six formats, and for a WAV holding a DTS or AC-3 stream, no title is guessed from the filename, deliberately, so that a filename can never overwrite a good title already in your library. Lists fall back to the file's own name, extension included.
- Rename the audio on its own. Same outcome, as the sidecar is only found sitting beside a file of exactly that name.
- Delete the sidecar. Your library still holds the tags, so nothing looks wrong until it is rebuilt or the track is scanned somewhere new. Open the track in the Tag Editor tab and press Save Tags to write it again (the tab will say Saved to library only, but the
.tagsfile is still written); Write .tags also rewrites it, when the card offers that button.
Still not right
If a raw-bitstream track shows no tags even though a .tags file sits beside it, check the two names match exactly, then report it from the Report a Bug section in Settings. See How to report a bug.