Lossless and studio audio formats (.flac, .wav, .m4a, .ogg, .aiff) tend to come from professional pipelines, and their metadata describes the recording session as much as the music. A Broadcast Wave file names the originator, the equipment chain and a unique take identifier; a WAV often embeds the local filesystem path it was saved to; and files tagged against MusicBrainz carry database IDs that link them to every other file tagged from the same source.
Scan a FLAC, WAV, M4A, OGG & AIFF fileBroadcast Wave (the bext chunk in professional WAV files) is written by recorders and studios and is all about provenance. It carries the originator - the organisation or person who made the recording - an originator reference that ties the file to one specific recorder and session, the date and time the session took place, and a coding history: the chain of equipment and encoding steps the audio passed through, which describes the studio setup that produced it. It can also hold a UMID, a unique material identifier designed to be globally unique to a single take and able to embed the recording device and the moment of capture. None of these describe the music; they describe how and where it was made.
A plain WAV records more than sound in its INFO chunk. The archival-location field routinely holds the local filesystem path the file was saved to, which exposes a username and the folder layout of the machine that wrote it. The engineer, the technician and whoever commissioned the recording are named in their own fields, the software that wrote the file is stamped in, and a creation date records when the recording was made. These are typed by people in a studio, so they name people.
An M4A bought or downloaded from a store carries the account it was delivered to, exactly as a purchased video does: the Apple ID (an email address), the account holder's name, the purchase date, and the country of the store, which indicates where the account is registered. Separately, files tagged against MusicBrainz or AcoustID carry database identifiers - a recording ID, a track ID, an artist ID, an acoustic fingerprint - that link the file to the global database and to every other file tagged from the same source, so they correlate a whole collection. The ISRC ties the file to the released recording regardless of renaming.
Cover art is read as its own image, so any EXIF, camera serial or GPS coordinates the artwork photograph carries surface too - and, coming from the picture rather than the audio, they survive any edit to the sound tags. The scan also lists which tag containers the file holds (a single file can carry several, written by different tools at different times), and surfaces the licence terms, the publisher and the production copyright notice wherever the file states them.
This is a selection. The full field manual documents the fields read from each format.
Beyond artist and title, they carry the technical stream details plus whatever the source pipeline wrote: a Broadcast Wave WAV names the originator, a coding history and a unique take ID; a plain WAV can embed the local file path it was saved to and the engineer's name; an M4A download carries the Apple ID it was bought under; and files tagged against MusicBrainz carry database IDs. Cover art brings its own image metadata too.
It is the professional-audio provenance block in a WAV, written by recorders and studios. It names the originator, a reference tying the file to one recorder and session, the session date and time, the equipment and encoding chain (coding history), and often a UMID unique to a single take. It describes how the recording was made, not the music.
Yes. The archival-location field in a WAV's INFO chunk routinely holds the full local path the file was saved to, which exposes a username and the folder layout of the machine that made it. The scan reads it and flags it.
This tool inspects these files in your browser; it does not strip them. Locally, ffmpeg -map_metadata -1 or a dedicated tag editor clears the tags. Note that a WAV's Broadcast Wave and INFO chunks and any embedded cover-art metadata each need removing - clearing one visible field does not touch the others.
It can. Store-delivered M4A files carry the Apple ID (an email) the download was made under, the account holder's name, the purchase date and the store country. These are written in at delivery and identify the account, not the music.
File X-Ray reads FLAC, WAV, M4A, OGG & AIFF files entirely in your browser - the file never leaves your device. This format is inspected, not modified. Scan a file now.