# Preferences - Audio Files - Common

The Audio panel allows you to control settings common to all supported audio formats, specific to ID3 (MP3, MP2, AIFF, DFF, DFS, WAV) files, MPEG-4 (M4A, M4B, M4R, M4V, MP4) files, FLAC & OGG and APE (APE, WV) files.

## Settings Common to All Audio Formats

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.

Sound Check values are calculated based on stored ReplayGain values. The Sound Check offset setting can be used to change the parameters used to produce the value. The offset, if any is relative to the LUFS value used to produce the ReplayGain Track Gain and ReplayGain Track Peak items. While any reasonable LUFS value can be used as a baseline for loudness, it makes more sense if all your tracks are based on the same value. As mentioned above, Yate's default LUFS value used in the Replay Gain calculations is -18. iTunes supposedly uses -16 as its LUFS value when doing its calculations. You can leave the replay gain LUFS as -18 and specify a Sound Check offset of 2 if you wish the Sound Check settings to be based on -16.

Typically the BPM field contains an integer value. However, at times it might be useful to maintain a BPM value with a fractional component. As many applications expect an integer value, Yate uses an additional tag to maintain the fractional value which is mapped to FBPM. The standard BPM mapping is always written by Yate as an integer value. Yate handles the use of the multiple tags transparently....you only work with a single BPM field. There are two settings which control how BPM values are displayed and written.

BPM Precision describes the maximum number of fractional positions that can be displayed. This setting controls both the display of BPM values and how the values are written. When the value is 0, fractional values are not supported, and the alternate mapping is not written. When non zero, the alternate mapping is only written if the BPM value has a fractional component.

The Fixed option affects the minimum number of fractional digits which are displayed. The option has no effect when the precision is 0. When Fixed is enabled, the precision represents the minimum number of fractional positions which are displayed. A BPM value of 123.4 with a precision of 3 and fixed, will display as 123.400.

When logging the raw data associated with an audio file, you can limit the amount of data that is displayed for a given low level item. The limit field provides a truncation point for any one item's dump. When the value of the limit is zero, 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 when loading files. When Filename Extension is selected the field is set to the unmodified filename extension. When Extension or Stream is chosen, MPEG-4, OGG and Opus files will have the field set to the audio stream type (AAC, ALAC, Opus or Vorbis). Other audio types will have the field set to the filename extension in upper case.

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 and OGG 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.

Many 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 displaying the Free column. Simply right click on the file list column headers and enable the column. By default, when Yate writes the tag to an audio file, it will attempt to use 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 settings are not used for all audio file formats as for some formats the concept of free space is meaningless.

By default the free space settings are used for audio and video files. In Preferences-Video you can override these values for video files.

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 a file is written.

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 track and disc values as displayed 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.

Whenever a file is written you have the option of setting the default rating to five stars if a track is loved.

Whenever you save a file you can automatically set the refresh extended attribute used by the Doppler music player. The settings is ignored unless Doppler is installed. More information can be found in Working with Doppler.

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, FLAC and OGG 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. Roon - Read Only is a special function used to enable all Roon specific settings and force them to Read Only. No other settings are changed. Selecting Audirvana requires you to make the following tag mapping changes in Preferences Ape Mappings for the default write items:

- Disc must be mapped to DISCNUMBER
- Disc Count must be mapped to DISCTOTAL
- Track Count must be mapped to TRACKTOTAL

Additional information:

APE Audio Settings

ID3 Audio Settings

MPEG-4 Audio Settings

FLAC/OGG Audio Settings

Roon Audio Settings