# Preferences - Audio Files - Common

The Audio panel allows you to control settings common to all supported audio formats, specific to ID3 (mp3, aiff, dsf, wav) files, MPEG-4 (m4a, m4b, m4v, mp4) files, and FLAC files.

### Settings Common to All Audio Formats

Yate fully supports the ability of fields to contain multiple values. Within the data the multiple values are separated by characters with a binary value of zero. As this character is not visible and occupies no space when displayed, Yate allows you to have a multi value delimiter replace the zero character when displaying the field in the standard editing panels. Note that when editing fields in advanced editing panels, the multiple values are displayed one per line and the multi value delimiter is not displayed. Many applications which display tagging information, such as iTunes, ignore multiple values if found. Setting the value to an empty string will treat it as the default value of ;;;. Note it is recommended to leave the default value of ;;; as is.

The default target level for Yate's ReplayGain processing is -18 LUFS (Loudness units relative to Full Scale). You can specify a different target level if you wish.

When logging the raw data associated with an audio file, you have the option of dumping the binary data associated with each low level frame, atom or comment. The limit field provides a truncation point for any one item's dump. When the limit field is set to 0, no truncation will occur. Remember, images are quite large.

The metadata Length field can automatically be set to the actual duration of the audio stream in milliseconds, by setting the Auto set length field when loading files option.

The metadata File Type field can automatically be set to the file's filename extension by setting the Auto set File Type field when loading files option.

When loading an audio file you can choose the sorting method to be applied to the Involved People and Musician Credits fields. The choices are: Do not Sort, Sort Credits, Sort People or Sort Credits and People. You can also choose if you want names associated with the same credit to be merged into a single item. Note that in FLAC files this option does not guarantee that the fields will be sorted exactly the same as when the files were saved. As individual items are written for each role-name, a certain amount of coalescing is always done. The only way to guarantee what you see is what you get is via the Preserve Exact Appearance of Involved People and Musician Credits setting.

Most audio files have free space in the file in order to make it faster to update when changing the tag information. mp3 files tend not to waste too much space but you might be amazed as to how much space is wasted in some m4a files. Hint: you can view the free space in the file list by unhiding the free column. Simply right click on the file list column headers and select free. By default, when Yate writes the tag to an audio file, it will attempt to utilize free space in the file in order to make the writing process faster. However, it will not toss any extra free space left over. There are two options which can modify this behaviour:

Remove free space
  This option tells Yate to get rid of as much free space as possible when rewriting the file. If you have a non zero value in the padding field, it will keep up to that amount of free space. Note that due to errors within some applications, a padding size of zero may not be honoured. A small pad may always be added.
Padding
  The above text describes how Padding is used when Remove free space is checked. Padding is also used as the amount of free space to allocate when an audio file must be completely rewritten. The maximum value is 100000.

Note that the free space options are ignored by dff, dsf and wav files where there is no benefit to having the free space.

Yate maintains a field called Tagging Time. It is intended to represent the time the tag was created or modified. You can elect to have this field set automatically any time the tagging information has changed.

You can elect to write the Track, Track Count, Disc and Disc Count values as displayed as opposed to their strict numeric values. When Write padded track and disc values is set, the values will be written according to the File List Preferences padding values. Note that this setting is only meaningful if you want to import the files into other applications which which display the exact values contained in the tag metadata. Note also than this option has no effect on MPEG-4 files which store the values in a binary format.

If you want to preserve the modification date/time of audio files while saving the files, enable the Preserve modification date/time when saving audio files option. Warning: unless there is some specific reason that you require unchanged modification stamps you should not set this option.

Yate stores ratings in one of four formats: Direct, iTunes or Full or Direct*2. Internally ratings are stored as Full. When Full is selected for ID3 and FLAC files as the preferred rating encoding, a value in the range of 0 to 255 is read and written. There is no real standard as to how the range of values gets assigned to a star rating. Yate has its own defaults and if you only use Yate and iTunes to display ratings you will not have any issues. However, if you use other media players that display ratings it is possible that they assume a different assignment of the 256 values to 5 stars. Yate allows you configure how each of the 256 values is assigned to a star representation and what value will be assigned when a star value is chosen. Changing this mapping will have no effect on the ratings assigned to iTunes or those stored in MPEG-4 files (unless already open and modified). This is because those values are always in iTunes format and are appropriately converted when required. However, and its a big however, changing this mapping will not automatically change the values already written to files with a Full rating type, nor will it automatically change the current internal values of tracks already loaded. If you wish to alter the existing ratings values for those cases an action statement named Translate Ratings is provided. More information on rating mappings can be found in How Ratings Work.

You can change various audio settings by choosing an application preset. Note that Kodi uses a 10 star rating system. Ratings set in Yate will appear as 0, 2, 4, 8 or 10 stars in Kodi. Note also, that selecting Roon changes quite a few audio settings. It will be helpful to read the Roon Audio Settings topic.

Additional information:

ID3 Audio Settings

MPEG-4 Audio Settings

FLAC Audio Settings

Roon Audio Settings