Can you have too much metadata?

[Anonymous]

I’ve used Jaikoz for several years now and have added copious amounts of metadata to the files that comprise my music library. While it is not necessary to include all this extra data to correctly identify and classify my music I find having the added information enhances my enjoyment and appreciation of music.
Is there a point at which there could be “too much of a good thing”? Could the added data inhibit or in anyway degrade the reproduction of the sound files themselves?
This most likely belongs in the “dumb question” category but I’m throwing it out to the forum regardless.

Thanks,

mjc

[paultaylor]

I don’t believe so, and certainly in the case of Flac the metadata is all stored after the audio. In the case of ID3 formats such as Wav/Aiff and MP3 the metadata is stored at the start of the files but audio players can just read the header to inform them of the metadata size and then skip over straight to the audio.

Textual metadata is so small compared to the audio it is irrelevent. I suppose the only possible metadata that could have any effect would be really large uncompressed binary data such as cover image in .bmp format. But SongKong always uses JPG/PNG.