9 ms·

Why does my ripped CD have messed up track names? And why is one track missing?

168 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

JohnFen 1y ago
MusicBrainz and CDDB have become error-ridden enough that I've essentially stopped bothering with them and have switched back to just entering the information manually.
- dawnerd 1y ago
  It's worse if you're ripping foreign audio. I got a bunch of discs from Japan which I would assume, being Japan and all, there would be excellent data online. Wrong. Every single album got matched to something else. Even accurip was incorrect. I pretty much don't trust any of the online data sources anymore and just manually enter meta. And don't do what I did... don't just lets beets run unattended. What a pain that was.
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    Yes, you're right. Also, with obscure or rare CDs. If they're in the databases at all, the odds are better than 50% that the data is incorrect to some degree, or they are confused with completely different albums.
    - jeffbee 1y ago
      Isn't that still a labor-saving starting point?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - setr 1y ago
        the problem with false positives is that a single instance means you have to review every record meticulously, because you have no idea where the system has lied to you, or how many times (because the system itself doesn't). If you're going to review everything anyways, it's often better to simply be slow and correct to begin with rather than diff and correct every item. this is why it's usually better to be overaggressive with saying "I don't know" rather than crossing your fingers and shitting out an answer and hoping you get away with it.
        dylan604 1y ago
        When did we switch the conversation to LLM issues? =) One of the devs for a company I used to work shocked me when he said "bad data is better than no data" when inquiring about why the input field was limited to a drop down of pre-filled values that were irrelevant with no way of filling in correct data. At that point, I just felt the entire database was suspect
      - JohnFen 1y ago
        Often not, because it's less effort to type the information in fresh than to review and edit the existing information. I'm not saying the services are always overly incorrect, just that they're incorrect often enough that the path of least resistance was to stop using them.
        dylan604 1y ago
        Plus, it gave me something to do while the CD was importing rather than just pushing into the background while I started working on something else and promptly forget about the import.
      - jandrese 1y ago
        Depends how long it takes you to figure out what the problems are and fixing them. Debugging is usually harder than coding, and the amount of data we are talking about is fairly small. Just typing it in could easily be faster.
      - pavon 1y ago
        It depends. I'd like to argue that you have to enter the information one way or another, why not share it and save others the work in the future, but in reality it is often quite a bit slower. MusicBrainz likes to collect more information than a normal CD riper would ask for, with more pages to click-through, so that is a bit slower. However, the main annoyance is when you have to make a correction that isn't auto approved, and then you have to wait 7 days before your tagger/ripper software will see changes you made. I wish there was a better workflow to tell Picard to use a pending edit[1]. I still always use MusicBrainz, and enjoy contributing to it, but more like others enjoy contributing to Wikipedia, rather than as an efficiency boost. [1]https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-1278 https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-1278
  - lksaar 1y ago
    your best shout for jp cds is hoping someone added them on discogs
    - bananalychee 1y ago
      I think about half of the Japanese albums I tag have a mistake of some sort on Discogs, such as wrong okurigana or kanji usage. I've corrected some of them myself, but it happens so often that I've mostly given up. In the end it's faster to transcribe from the back cover.
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    I was doing audio + metadata ingestion for the major labels and they sent us a truck load of East Asian CDs of different languages, and here's me with a team of poor minimum wage high school grads looking at me all crazy.
- GauntletWizard 1y ago
  I just ripped a small collection (only ~200 discs), and I encountered all of the problems that have been complained about in this thread. I still used Musicbrainz, because it was easier for me to double-check and fix the entries in their DB than to manually type all the data myself. When bandcamp releases were available but nothing was in the database, I found it quick and simple to copy+paste the track listing into MB and create a new release. Combining it with the TOC I'd already been searching for, I got perfect rips every time without much issue. Even with a significant amount of time double checking and fixing the metadata, I consider it a good use of time. I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record.
  - cloud8421 1y ago
    > Even with a significant amount of time double checking and fixing the metadata, I consider it a good use of time. I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record. This is the spirit - I've started doing the same for releases that don't appear in MusicBrainz and it feels great knowing that I'm not just doing this for myself.
  - mayneack 1y ago
    There are userscripts to automatically do this from sources like bandcamp: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Guides/Userscripts https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Guides/Userscripts
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    > I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record. That was how I felt about it in the earlier days, when I'd actively participate in updating/correcting the databases. I stopped feeling that way years ago, though. Right or wrong, it felt like a losing battle as so many corrections were never actually adopted.
- al_borland 1y ago
  Was there a period where it was good? I tried in back around 2001 or 2002 and it produced a mess. I swore it off and figured it wouldn’t be around long. Here we are over 20 years later hearing that it’s too error-ridden to use.
  - JodieBenitez 1y ago
    Never worked fine for me, at least not fine enough to trust it.
  - jandrese 1y ago
    These days something like MusicBrainz is effectively a legacy system. So few people buy CDs anymore that there's not a lot of interest in maintaining it. It's fairly hard to even find a computer with an optical disk reader these days, especially if you are looking at laptops.
    - cloud8421 1y ago
      Note that the scope of the project goes beyond CDs, it's a catalogue for pretty much any format where you can play music.
    - Avamander 1y ago
      It's used as the basis in a _lot_ of places. So fixing errors fixes them in a lot of other websites (and infoboxes).
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
egypturnash 1y ago
Damn, MusicBrainz is still running? "MusicBrainz is operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a California based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping MusicBrainz free and open source." - the gloriously retro-looking front page
- piperswe 1y ago
  Still running and still doing great! Some of us still curate a local music library instead of streaming ;)
  - masklinn 1y ago
    You can curate a music library without ripping CDs tho.
    - JohnFen 1y ago
      Depends on your musical tastes. A good 25% of the music in my library is not available in any form other than used CDs.
      - dwedge 1y ago
        What kind of music?
        mtillman 1y ago
        Not sure about OP but I have all manner of blues and jazz recordings unavailable via streaming. There are also lots of obscure Japanese game and rock recordings that aren't in Apple or Spotify though to Spotify's credit, they have a lot of game content. Streaming is mostly in service of licenses and margins which as a shareholder, that makes sense to me.
        shermantanktop 1y ago
        People seem to assume that any decent creative output always gets carried forward to the next form of media tech. But there are 78s that didn’t make to LP, much less anything after that.
Asmod4n 1y ago
CD Text is a thing, sadly no major label is using it anymore to embed metadata into their records so such a thing like MusicBrainz wouldn't be needed. Sony was a big supporter of it ~25 years ago.
- dylan604 1y ago
  [flagged]
- trentnix 1y ago
  For the younger crowd: fancy head units (that's what we called the essential aftermarket CD player/receiver in the dash of your vehicle) would show you CD Text with artist, album, and track name. It would melt the brains of your friends when the name of the song that was playing would scroll by on an old-school, single- or multi-line LCD display. It was a massive flex in its day. Good times...
  - badc0ffee 1y ago
    My 2006 Toyota had that. What I really wanted was an aux port, or even a cassette deck I could use with an adapter to plug in my iPod. Instead I had to make do with a FM transmitter plugged into the cigarette lighter.
  - rhinoceraptor 1y ago
    My 2017 Focus ST still has a CD player with CD text, and I actually do listen to music on CD in it, the bluetooth quality is noticeably worse for whatever reason. I got my first iPod in about 2007 in middle school, and I only ever had about 10-20 CDs growing up, but I started getting into CDs about a year ago. It seems like there is a minor resurgence now that vinyl is expensive, since CDs still cost the same as they ever did, and a lot of them are cheaper even without inflation. I picked up a copy of Pretty Hate Machine at a Walmart for $8 the other day.
  - ssl-3 1y ago
    Amusingly, my 13-year-old Honda does that -- even though it doesn't have CD Text support. The factory stereo has a recent copy of Gracenote's CDDB built-in. It also automagically rips and compresses Red Book CDs to to internal storage. And it is smart enough to play a CD seemingly like regular -- with random track access and such -- while concurrently [and rather quickly] ripping the entire disc. It's mobilized piracy at the most invisible form. But yeah: CD Text is/was neat, at least in concept. I never got a chance to use it; none of my audio hardware ever supported it. (Supposedly, it also supported song lyrics.)
piperswe 1y ago
> Edits on MusicBrainz spend 7 days in limbo after they're created Not all edits, just major ones (e.g. name changes). Minor edits usually get auto-accepted.
- amiga386 1y ago
  And just so people know, their edits were applied in March this year... Edit #122458416 - Edit medium Vote tally: 0 yes : 0 no Status: Applied Opened: 2025-02-24 00:02 UTC Closed: 2025-03-03 01:00 UTC For quicker closing: 3 unanimous votes If no votes cast: Accept upon closing
  - infl8ed 1y ago
    Actually, and quite interestingly, it looks like their second edit (to separate the tracks) failed: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458694 https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458694 Status: Failed dependency This edit failed either because an entity it was modifying no longer exists, or the entity can not be modified in this manner anymore. Clicking through to the CD release we can see that it indeed still has those two tracks combined https://musicbrainz.org/release/af4dc096-65d2-4cc5-9e0c-176d64fc4d04 https://musicbrainz.org/release/af4dc096-65d2-4cc5-9e0c-176d...
    - amiga386 1y ago
      It did fail, because as you see, that edit's track 5 says "Rainclous" ... but https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458416 https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458416 was in play to change that to "Raincloud"... so https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458694 https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458694 failed because two edits wanted to change the same medium at the same time. They got the change made later in https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122791893 https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122791893
- Avamander 1y ago
  Faster if someone votes on the edit, which you can request on their IRC/Discord/Discourse if there's a need (like larger or dependant edits).
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
There's always going to be outliers but I find MusicBrainz pretty useful. I note that a lot of CD-text has poor application of title capitalization and MB usually has it in a more rational form. My ripping system presents a choice when both are available and I usually pick MB. There's also the benefit that the MB database is Unicode and CD-text is whatever the authoring tool used which is usually CP1252 but sometimes not.
riansanderson 1y ago
tangentially related- does anyone have a good recommendation on an external CD drive that works well with macOS and has a good form factor and build quality? I have an ancient thinkpad that I use a couple of times a year _just for reading cds_ and and have considered retiring it. But all the CD drives I see on amazon look like disposable crap.
- TheAmazingRace 1y ago
  Anything made by Pioneer these days is a good choice. That said, Pioneer just recently exited the optical disc drive market a month or so ago, so you'll want to pick up a drive while you still can. They tend to be pricier than your generic external disc drive, but they are dead reliable, and fully compatible with software like EAC and XLD. I have the Pioneer BDR-XS07S slot loading external BluRay burner drive and it does a great job ripping audio CDs.
- Synaesthesia 1y ago
  The Apple superdrive
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    While I've ripped hundreds of discs with mine, they do have some downsides. It can be a bitch and a half to get a disc out if it can't be read properly. Even drutil wouldn't eject such discs. There's also no way to use mini CD/DVDs with them. Not that those were ever super popular but if you have any it's an annoyance. I replaced my SuperDrive with an 5.25" internal drive in an external powered enclosure. I can always get unreadable discs out easily, have no problem with mini discs, and I'm not stuck with an extremely short USB cable. A SuperDrive isn't a bad option but there's better available.
- dawnerd 1y ago
  Pick up an internal drive and get a good enclosure. Way better than any of the external junk on Amazon. Better yet get one of the LG bluray drives that support ripping 4k discs. Might need to flash the firmware. That’s what I use and it’s great and really fast for plain cds as a bonus.
pflenker 1y ago
Somewhat related: some conscious artistic choices - such as writing down two tracks but delivering them as one (not sure if this is what happened here) can’t really be transferred into databases. I own a cd where one track name is a small icon depicting a heart stabbed with a rather lengthy knife. To my knowledge, this track has no canonical name. Any digital version of this cd betrays the respective author‘s interpretation of the icon. And then, of course, there’s „Love Symbol“: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Sniffnoy 1y ago
  What's the CD?
  - pflenker 1y ago
    The Inchtabokatables - Ultra
- indrora 1y ago
  How about "Naming the CDs" There's a handful of albums that MusicBrainz doesn't quite have the right cd naming for since one was labeled "LEFT" and the other "RIGHT" and not 1/2 -- there is no canonical 1/2 order.
- FearNotDaniel 1y ago
  > can’t really be transferred into databases Of course they can, it's up to the person designing the database schema to anticipate what is a common artistic practice and model the data accordingly. It might be that specific databases like MusicBrainz and Gracenote haven't accounted for that, but if you own the schema you can easily set up a one-to-many (parent/child) relationship between physical track and song name. One extreme example of this would be the "Lovesexy" album by (the artist formerly known as) Prince, which in its original CD form had only one track, containing 9 songs. I think the Spotify version is still faithful to this. This and many other common "conscious artistic choices" ought to be collected into a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Recorded Music", if that is not already a thing... In your example above, yes it's true that many song titles and artist names are fully and partially graphic symbols with no direct text representation (another thing Prince was fond of), but again given the prevalence of this there's no reason a smart data schema couldn't model a song or artist having a 'canonical' name that can only be represented by some graphic format along with one or more pronounceable/text-encodable alternatives (TAFKAP/Love Symbol) and so on; and of course tracking the fact that the 'preferred' identifier can change over time (Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, to mention a non-Prince example).
retrodaredevil 1y ago
A maintain my own digital music collection. The only two tools I use for maintaining the CD portion of my collection are k3b and MusicBrainz Picard. k3b can rip to flac and it will on embed metadata present on the CD itself. Then after I rip it, I add it to Picard. I use the "lookup CD" feature in Picard, which gives me a selection of releases to choose from. Among the choices, I usually see a release matching the catalog number on my CD's case. When I don't see a matching release, I will typically add the disc ID to an existing release, or I will create a new release, or sometimes even creating a new release + new release group and add the necessary metadata to MusicBrainz. I haven't tried any automatic tagging process like the ripping program the article talks about does, mostly because I want to use Picard to make sure the metadata is correct or contribute to MusicBrainz if it isn't. I like MusicBrainz a lot because applications like Plex use it very well to group release groups together and will (usually) deduplicate identical recordings so that identical tracks can share a rating. It's a really great database and is kept up to date pretty well.
- mayneack 1y ago
  Yeah, imo using musicbrainz/picard is great for the process of bringing something into your collection. I encounter errors like others here have mentioned, but they're straightforward to fix. Importantly, it sets up a reference to an evolving update process so changes down the line can get back to my files cleanly.
- commotionfever 1y ago
  since you mention Picard and wanting contribute to MusicBrainz. I'm working on a new fast tagger[1] in the spirit of Picard or beets. Just a little different and more scriptable It makes it's best attempt to match with MusicBrainz, but if there's no match it it offers links to pre-seed MusicBrainz with tools like Harmony https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag
  - CharlesW 1y ago
    Harmony (https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/ https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/) is amazing, and completely changed my relationship with MusicBrainz. What are you using for tag reading/writing in Go? Robust, complete options are non-existent in JavaScript land (Deno, Bun, Node, etc.), so I ended up creating a Wasm version of TagLib with a TypeScript API.
Henchman21 1y ago
When I was building out infrastructure to support streaming at Sony Music Entertainment, it was well known that interns would input the metadata. Typos were rife and genres? Made up out of whole cloth. It feels safe to assume that the situation has improved since then, but I doubt seriously we’ll ever be free of typos ;)
- lloydatkinson 1y ago
  It's sad Sony put the effort into writing rootkits for music CD's but did nothing to automate, flag, fix typos for metadata...
  - Henchman21 1y ago
    Agreed. I could say tons here, but it’ll suffice to say that I am wildly happy I no longer work there!
  - mxuribe 1y ago
    I remember the Sony rootkits...Since then and to this day, i avoid buying anything related to Sony as best i can. Funny thing is, folks who know me know that i am not the kind of person who holds a grudge....but something about that rootkit event really brought the ire in me....one of the extremely few times where i held a grudge. So, i avoid Sony and go on with my life. I also stop buying at other companies...but for other companies for some reason i don;'t hold onto the ire...i just stop buying from them, and quietly move on...but Sony....i don't get it, but the dislike is crazy.
    - Henchman21 1y ago
      I recall a meeting where my team was asked to do some technical legwork for the implementation. To his credit, my boss stood up, said some words about ethics, and led our team out the door. It wasn’t the entire org… just the music business folks as I recall. I left shortly thereafter.
      - mxuribe 1y ago
Sniffnoy 1y ago
Man, I thought this was going to be about a decoding tool that had some edge case incorrect, but instead it was just about incorrect entries in a database that was used in place of actually decoding...
cloud8421 1y ago
I use MusicBrainz and donate every month - yeah data is not perfect, but you can go and fix it yourself if needed, and the UI is extremely functional without any frills.
Lammy 1y ago
I used to do the MusicBrainz thing with Picard and later with Beets, but I got sick of Somebody Else's Metadata because of MusicBrainz's (former?) policy where everything must be Title Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve. I prefer my tags to match the artist's choice, because I consider it a tonal indicator that helps set the mood for the work. It seems like they might not enforce that any more since the album I was going to pick on as an example is now tagged like I have it, although I also have lower-case “my bloody valentine” Artist tags on every track with Title Cased “My Bloody Valentime” Album-Artist tag for browsing in Navidrome: https://musicbrainz.org/release/1e4c282b-8b0d-4d20-9f74-175f0063d73d https://musicbrainz.org/release/1e4c282b-8b0d-4d20-9f74-175f... …but I already got out of the habit and will still just keep typing them out myself :) I also always include the catalog number in the Comment field and in brackets in my folder names to separate different releases of supposedly the same thing. Good example of why you would want to do this is the 2004 vs the 2007 releases of MM..FOOD? where the last track (Kookies) had to be redone to remove the Sesame Street samples: - 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_XcL4nYos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_XcL4nYos - 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYSwvdEfeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYSwvdEfeY Shout-out to https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ and https://fanart.tv/ https://fanart.tv/ for high-quality album art to embed.
- Avamander 1y ago
  I can't recall when something like that was enforced. Artistic intent is definitely something that editors and guidelines intend to preserve. Though in some cases it might be hard to determine if something is a mistake or intentional - there are incredibly weird releases.
- amiga386 1y ago
  > policy where everything must be Title Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve If the music artist decided how it should be on the CD sleeve, and you can show that, then you can go with that. But more often than not, the sleeve is done by the record company's graphic designers, not the music artist. https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Titles https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Titles > Album and song titles are often found in upper‐case on the back cover of CDs. For example, the album Songs of Love and Hate is written as “SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE” on the cover. This is usually the choice of a graphic designer, not the artist. So, instead of copying the title from the cover, we follow certain rules to capitalize a title. https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction_and_artist_intent https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction... > Error Correction: There are many cases of record companies incorrectly reproducing titles or even artist names, or breaking generally accepted rules of usage for stylistic purposes. In such cases it often makes sense to fix errors and standardize irregularities, valuing correct spelling, punctuation and grammar over faithfulness to the printed release cover. > Artist Intent: Artists sometimes choose to present names and titles in ways that deliberately contradict the rules of the language they're in (e.g. unorthodox spellings) and/or the MusicBrainz Style Guidelines. To describe the way we handle such choices, we use the term "artist intent." The general idea is that if an artist intended something to be written in a special way, then MusicBrainz should follow that intent. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find out what an artist intended. If you want to claim that some deviation from the Style Guidelines should be considered artist intent, the burden of proof lies on you.
KwanEsq 1y ago
Huh, once I saw the image with the discrepancies I immediately assumed 'ah, "Nothing Coming Soon" must be in the pre-gap of "Don't Need a Reason", especially with that track length, and the rip combined that into one music file', but no, turns out it just isn't defined in the disc metadata at all. Wonder if that's a (mastering?) error, given that the TITLE metadata doesn't even include it.
rconti 1y ago
> Aside from some audio tracks and a table of contents over those tracks, very little extra information is included on a disk - you've pretty much only got the artist name, album name and track names actually burned into the disk. Huh, I actually didn't think there was any metadata at all.
- dhosek 1y ago
  Yeah he goes on to talk about an external data source for metadata, so this statement is, as far as I know, wrong, even by the standard of what’s in this article.
  - rconti 1y ago
    no, there's a part about it later, assuming we can take their word for it: (ugh, HN formatting is the _worst_) ------ Taking a look at the metadata embedded into the disk itself, we can see that track 6 is actually titled "Don't Need a Reason" on there: FILE "./06. Finish Ticket - Nothing Coming Soon.flac" WAVE TRACK 06 AUDIO TITLE "Don't Need A Reason" ISRC USDPK2300133 INDEX 01 00:00:00
- KwanEsq 1y ago
  Yeah audio CDs do (or at least can) carry those bare bones of metadata, which can be used by some CD players with built-in displays to display the currently playing track title etc. It's defined by the CD-Text extension[0] to the Red Book standard. I think classical releases probably make greater use of it to encode things like composer and arranger, since they are more important to that audience, but for the average popular music release you're only going to get the artist and title, and maybe the ISRC that few are going to care about/display anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-Text
dhosek 1y ago
I had always thought that the odds of doubled discs based on the TOC were unlikely, but it turns out that with discs with fewer tracks (≤4 or so), you can get duplicates quite easily.
- devmor 1y ago
  I wonder if this explains why som EPs I have received as ZIPs from friends get tagged incorrectly in programs like Jellyfin.
at_a_remove 1y ago
I am keeping an eye on this thread, as I plan to eventually rip my somewhat large collection, but would prefer to do it just the one time. Exact Audio Copy, the author seems to have moved on to other interests, which is a shame because I was looking for something compatible with an autoloader. And it looks like dbpoweramp is the only one left in that arena. I am allllll about the metadata. Also, a thumbnail, synced lyrics if they could be found, custom metadata for hyperlinks back to entries on Discogs and MusicBrainz, perhaps some ReplayGain values in fields on the FLAC, depending on my MP3 processing case ... but I have so many unanswered questions.
- MyPasswordSucks 1y ago
  > Exact Audio Copy, the author seems to have moved on to other interests, which is a shame because I was looking for something compatible with an autoloader. Nah, it's mostly just reached the stage where there's nothing left to do - all the "objective" stuff works as it should, and any feature adds would be a pretty heavy undertaking. It was updated a little less than a year ago, and when I contacted the author he was very responsive. Would it be nice to have a keyboard shortcut for proper [1] cuesheet creation (ironically, all the options except the proper one have keyboard shortcuts)? Yeah, but I've learned to live with it. Would it be nice to have super-duper tagging options? I dunno, from where I'm sitting, it seems like it'd just be duplicating a bunch of foobar2000 features for negligible gain. [1] Because nobody wants a .FLAC that starts with a few seconds of silence, inter-track gaps need to be appended to the end of the previous track, which is not how Red Book audio handles it, and means that the "proper" cuesheet format is technically a non-compliant cuesheet.
  - iggldiggl 1y ago
    > Because nobody wants a .FLAC that starts with a few seconds of silence, inter-track gaps need to be appended to the end of the previous track Side digression: For regular albums, where the pregap is just two seconds of silence I can absolutely understand that and prefer to put the pregap at the end of the previous song myself. However for live albums my feelings are a bit more torn – on the one hand there is something to the music starting immediately when playing a random track, but on the other hand any stage patter that might be present in the pregap usually refers to the upcoming track, and having that incongruously stuck at the end of the preceding track is at least to me somewhat annoying during random playback, too.
dd_xplore 1y ago
I see a lot of praise for MusicBrainz, is it really that good?
- lxgr 1y ago
  It's infinitely better than the alternative (which is to have tracks simply be named "Track 1", "Track 2" etc.), but much worse than the situation in an alternative universe where the "Red Book" standard for CDDA directly includes CD-Text and mandates its use for all compliant publishers.
k__ 1y ago
I remember having a game CD+R. It had scratches and even holes, but somehow it worked, lol.
- TylerE 1y ago
  Scratches effect much less than most people think, as long as they're superficial. (For instance, dings from the case are likely fine, but run the tip of a key across the one...) Contrary to what most people expect, the data pits on a CD are much closer to the label side than the shiny side - the bottom of the disc is a clear plastic layer that as far as the optics of the drive are concerned are out of focus.
mikepavone 1y ago
This is a small point, but calling the 33-byte unit a sector in CDDA is a bit misleading and probably incorrect for the quantity being labeled. This is a channel data frame and contains 24-bytes of audio data, 1 byte of subcode data (except for the channel data frames that have sync symbols instead) and the rest is error correction. This is the smallest grouping of data in CDDA, but it's not really an individually addressable unit. 98 of these channel data frames make up a timecode frame which represents 1/75th of a second of audio and has 2352 audio data bytes, 96 subcode bytes (2 frames have sync codes instead) with the remainder being sync and error correction. Timecode frames are addressable (via the timecodes embedded in the subcode data) and are the unit referred to in the TOC. This is probably what's being called a sector here. Notably, a CD-ROM sector corresponds 1:1 with a timecode frame. Note: Red book actually just confusingly calls both of these things frames and does not use the terms "channel data frame" or "timecode frame"
dogman1050 1y ago
I've ripped hundreds of CDs and the metadata is usually ok on commercial discs. When ripping CDs I created from LP rips, I use Mp3tag to make it right.
alexchantavy 1y ago
Wait so back in the day I remember Winamp let you configure a CDDB thing and it connected to something called.. Gracenote? (Am I remembering that correctly?) iTunes desktop at some point used to handle this all for you and I assumed it was pulling from those sources under the hood. Where did MusicBrainz come from?
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  Gracenote is alive and well, and mostly supporting the video entertainment industry I think but with forays into adtech and other such schemes.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicBrainz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicBrainz ”MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata (information about the performers, artists, songwriters, etc.) storehouse to become a structured online database for music.” More detail here: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/771/papers/ieeeIntelligentSystems/webservices/musicBrainz.pdf https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/771/papers/ieeeIntelligentSystem...
0points 1y ago
Well written. I am dealing with some similarities setting up a jellyfin server and the episode data of some series are rather incomplete. So I been contributing to tmdb for the last half year or so :)
sandreas 1y ago
Maybe for archival Purposes you could use `redumper` (https://github.com/superg/redumper https://github.com/superg/redumper) to prevent ripping mistakes. My personal workflow: - rip the audio CD via EAC with acousticID (flac) - retrieve metadata via beets in a script completely automated - convert flac to mp3 via beets inplace convert (see below) - backup the flac files to another location - self-host navidrome and use the substreamer / dsub app and smart playlists to listen "on the go" (The Apple usb-c-to-audiojack adapter is pretty decent) - transfer this via iTunes VM to my good old iPod Nano 7g as main listening device for audiobooks If anyone is looking for fast and accurate ripping hardware, recently I updated my recommended hardware list including a linked tutorial for EAC: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/ https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/ beets convert config: convert: auto: no ffmpeg: /usr/bin/ffmpeg opts: -codec:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 0 -ac 2 -ar 48000 -map_metadata 0 -movflags use_metadata_tags max_bitrate: 192 threads: 1
- maeln 1y ago
  ~Why use MP3 instead of opus, vorbis or AAC ? All of them have (most of the time) better compression ratio (and better quality) than MP3. Is it for compatibility reason ?~ edit: Ah, I missed the ipod nano part
  - nani8ot 1y ago
    iPod Nano 7th gen. does support AAC (AIFF & WAV too).
    - lxgr 1y ago
      All iPods except for the very first and second one have supported AAC out of the box, and I believe there was a firmware update even for the two that didn't. Apple didn't invent the format, but was definitely its biggest proponent from early on.
      - sandreas 1y ago
        Although the format might be superior in many ways, it has not replaced mp3 as the default format, because you can make mp3 sound pretty good and the space savings are not that important on modern devices. Interestingly the iPod Nano 6th generation I think was the first device to support fast-forward and rewind via headphone remote. That's the main reason I don't use my 512GB iFlash iPod classic 2009 mod as often as I want to, although the support for m4b (m4a+aac) audio books is pretty good. I've not tested ALAC on older iPods, which is a proprietary lossless format, but it might work on the newer more powerful ones (iPod touch)
b0a04gl 1y ago
[dead]
vkaku 1y ago
Perhaps I should create an overlay for MusicBrainz with sub-minute lag called ZombieBrainz. If you own a CD and send an edit with a $5 donation, it goes on volatile and nightly; It can go to beta instantly for $100 donations and if not it'll have to be flagged for violations. If it needs to happen instantly on stable, $10000 (generous patron tier, where I will write a blog post for this entry as well) else get to it in 3 months.
ubermonkey 1y ago
You know, I've only ever ripped with iTunes or Music on a Mac, and I've never run into this over (at this point) decades and thousands of rips. Am I just lucky?
I_dream_of_Geni 1y ago
Audio CD's are a SUPER mature technology: 43+ years old. How is this even an issue today??
- lxgr 1y ago
  Did you read the article? Most CDs don't include metadata, so that's commonly provided by third-party databases which both don't exactly know the original intent of the producer/publisher and can make mistakes.
  - I_dream_of_Geni 1y ago
    Pretty sure HN has general rules about being polite: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article?" The shoe definitely fits..
lxgr 1y ago
> Aside from some audio tracks and a table of contents over those tracks, very little extra information is included on a disk - you've pretty much only got the artist name, album name and track names actually burned into the disk. Is that so? Was that introduced very late in the life of CDs, or why was CDDB a thing then?

168 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

MusicBrainz and CDDB have become error-ridden enough that I've essentially stopped bothering with them and have switched back to just entering the information manually.

dawnerd 1y ago
It's worse if you're ripping foreign audio. I got a bunch of discs from Japan which I would assume, being Japan and all, there would be excellent data online. Wrong. Every single album got matched to something else. Even accurip was incorrect. I pretty much don't trust any of the online data sources anymore and just manually enter meta. And don't do what I did... don't just lets beets run unattended. What a pain that was.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  Yes, you're right. Also, with obscure or rare CDs. If they're in the databases at all, the odds are better than 50% that the data is incorrect to some degree, or they are confused with completely different albums.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    Isn't that still a labor-saving starting point?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - setr 1y ago
      the problem with false positives is that a single instance means you have to review every record meticulously, because you have no idea where the system has lied to you, or how many times (because the system itself doesn't). If you're going to review everything anyways, it's often better to simply be slow and correct to begin with rather than diff and correct every item. this is why it's usually better to be overaggressive with saying "I don't know" rather than crossing your fingers and shitting out an answer and hoping you get away with it.
      - dylan604 1y ago
        When did we switch the conversation to LLM issues? =) One of the devs for a company I used to work shocked me when he said "bad data is better than no data" when inquiring about why the input field was limited to a drop down of pre-filled values that were irrelevant with no way of filling in correct data. At that point, I just felt the entire database was suspect
    - JohnFen 1y ago
      Often not, because it's less effort to type the information in fresh than to review and edit the existing information. I'm not saying the services are always overly incorrect, just that they're incorrect often enough that the path of least resistance was to stop using them.
      - dylan604 1y ago
        Plus, it gave me something to do while the CD was importing rather than just pushing into the background while I started working on something else and promptly forget about the import.
    - jandrese 1y ago
      Depends how long it takes you to figure out what the problems are and fixing them. Debugging is usually harder than coding, and the amount of data we are talking about is fairly small. Just typing it in could easily be faster.
    - pavon 1y ago
      It depends. I'd like to argue that you have to enter the information one way or another, why not share it and save others the work in the future, but in reality it is often quite a bit slower. MusicBrainz likes to collect more information than a normal CD riper would ask for, with more pages to click-through, so that is a bit slower. However, the main annoyance is when you have to make a correction that isn't auto approved, and then you have to wait 7 days before your tagger/ripper software will see changes you made. I wish there was a better workflow to tell Picard to use a pending edit[1]. I still always use MusicBrainz, and enjoy contributing to it, but more like others enjoy contributing to Wikipedia, rather than as an efficiency boost. [1]https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-1278 https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-1278
- lksaar 1y ago
  your best shout for jp cds is hoping someone added them on discogs
  - bananalychee 1y ago
    I think about half of the Japanese albums I tag have a mistake of some sort on Discogs, such as wrong okurigana or kanji usage. I've corrected some of them myself, but it happens so often that I've mostly given up. In the end it's faster to transcribe from the back cover.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  I was doing audio + metadata ingestion for the major labels and they sent us a truck load of East Asian CDs of different languages, and here's me with a team of poor minimum wage high school grads looking at me all crazy.
GauntletWizard 1y ago
I just ripped a small collection (only ~200 discs), and I encountered all of the problems that have been complained about in this thread. I still used Musicbrainz, because it was easier for me to double-check and fix the entries in their DB than to manually type all the data myself. When bandcamp releases were available but nothing was in the database, I found it quick and simple to copy+paste the track listing into MB and create a new release. Combining it with the TOC I'd already been searching for, I got perfect rips every time without much issue. Even with a significant amount of time double checking and fixing the metadata, I consider it a good use of time. I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record.
- cloud8421 1y ago
  > Even with a significant amount of time double checking and fixing the metadata, I consider it a good use of time. I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record. This is the spirit - I've started doing the same for releases that don't appear in MusicBrainz and it feels great knowing that I'm not just doing this for myself.
- mayneack 1y ago
  There are userscripts to automatically do this from sources like bandcamp: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Guides/Userscripts https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Guides/Userscripts
- JohnFen 1y ago
  > I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record. That was how I felt about it in the earlier days, when I'd actively participate in updating/correcting the databases. I stopped feeling that way years ago, though. Right or wrong, it felt like a losing battle as so many corrections were never actually adopted.
al_borland 1y ago
Was there a period where it was good? I tried in back around 2001 or 2002 and it produced a mess. I swore it off and figured it wouldn’t be around long. Here we are over 20 years later hearing that it’s too error-ridden to use.
- JodieBenitez 1y ago
  Never worked fine for me, at least not fine enough to trust it.
- jandrese 1y ago
  These days something like MusicBrainz is effectively a legacy system. So few people buy CDs anymore that there's not a lot of interest in maintaining it. It's fairly hard to even find a computer with an optical disk reader these days, especially if you are looking at laptops.
  - cloud8421 1y ago
    Note that the scope of the project goes beyond CDs, it's a catalogue for pretty much any format where you can play music.
  - Avamander 1y ago
    It's used as the basis in a _lot_ of places. So fixing errors fixes them in a lot of other websites (and infoboxes).
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

egypturnash 1y ago

Damn, MusicBrainz is still running? "MusicBrainz is operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a California based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping MusicBrainz free and open source." - the gloriously retro-looking front page

piperswe 1y ago
Still running and still doing great! Some of us still curate a local music library instead of streaming ;)
- masklinn 1y ago
  You can curate a music library without ripping CDs tho.
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    Depends on your musical tastes. A good 25% of the music in my library is not available in any form other than used CDs.
    - dwedge 1y ago
      What kind of music?
      - mtillman 1y ago
        Not sure about OP but I have all manner of blues and jazz recordings unavailable via streaming. There are also lots of obscure Japanese game and rock recordings that aren't in Apple or Spotify though to Spotify's credit, they have a lot of game content. Streaming is mostly in service of licenses and margins which as a shareholder, that makes sense to me.
        shermantanktop 1y ago
        People seem to assume that any decent creative output always gets carried forward to the next form of media tech. But there are 78s that didn’t make to LP, much less anything after that.

Asmod4n 1y ago

CD Text is a thing, sadly no major label is using it anymore to embed metadata into their records so such a thing like MusicBrainz wouldn't be needed. Sony was a big supporter of it ~25 years ago.

dylan604 1y ago
[flagged]
trentnix 1y ago
For the younger crowd: fancy head units (that's what we called the essential aftermarket CD player/receiver in the dash of your vehicle) would show you CD Text with artist, album, and track name. It would melt the brains of your friends when the name of the song that was playing would scroll by on an old-school, single- or multi-line LCD display. It was a massive flex in its day. Good times...
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  My 2006 Toyota had that. What I really wanted was an aux port, or even a cassette deck I could use with an adapter to plug in my iPod. Instead I had to make do with a FM transmitter plugged into the cigarette lighter.
- rhinoceraptor 1y ago
  My 2017 Focus ST still has a CD player with CD text, and I actually do listen to music on CD in it, the bluetooth quality is noticeably worse for whatever reason. I got my first iPod in about 2007 in middle school, and I only ever had about 10-20 CDs growing up, but I started getting into CDs about a year ago. It seems like there is a minor resurgence now that vinyl is expensive, since CDs still cost the same as they ever did, and a lot of them are cheaper even without inflation. I picked up a copy of Pretty Hate Machine at a Walmart for $8 the other day.
- ssl-3 1y ago
  Amusingly, my 13-year-old Honda does that -- even though it doesn't have CD Text support. The factory stereo has a recent copy of Gracenote's CDDB built-in. It also automagically rips and compresses Red Book CDs to to internal storage. And it is smart enough to play a CD seemingly like regular -- with random track access and such -- while concurrently [and rather quickly] ripping the entire disc. It's mobilized piracy at the most invisible form. But yeah: CD Text is/was neat, at least in concept. I never got a chance to use it; none of my audio hardware ever supported it. (Supposedly, it also supported song lyrics.)

piperswe 1y ago

> Edits on MusicBrainz spend 7 days in limbo after they're created Not all edits, just major ones (e.g. name changes). Minor edits usually get auto-accepted.

amiga386 1y ago
And just so people know, their edits were applied in March this year... Edit #122458416 - Edit medium Vote tally: 0 yes : 0 no Status: Applied Opened: 2025-02-24 00:02 UTC Closed: 2025-03-03 01:00 UTC For quicker closing: 3 unanimous votes If no votes cast: Accept upon closing
- infl8ed 1y ago
  Actually, and quite interestingly, it looks like their second edit (to separate the tracks) failed: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458694 https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458694 Status: Failed dependency This edit failed either because an entity it was modifying no longer exists, or the entity can not be modified in this manner anymore. Clicking through to the CD release we can see that it indeed still has those two tracks combined https://musicbrainz.org/release/af4dc096-65d2-4cc5-9e0c-176d64fc4d04 https://musicbrainz.org/release/af4dc096-65d2-4cc5-9e0c-176d...
  - amiga386 1y ago
    It did fail, because as you see, that edit's track 5 says "Rainclous" ... but https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458416 https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458416 was in play to change that to "Raincloud"... so https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458694 https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458694 failed because two edits wanted to change the same medium at the same time. They got the change made later in https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122791893 https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122791893
Avamander 1y ago
Faster if someone votes on the edit, which you can request on their IRC/Discord/Discourse if there's a need (like larger or dependant edits).

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

There's always going to be outliers but I find MusicBrainz pretty useful. I note that a lot of CD-text has poor application of title capitalization and MB usually has it in a more rational form. My ripping system presents a choice when both are available and I usually pick MB. There's also the benefit that the MB database is Unicode and CD-text is whatever the authoring tool used which is usually CP1252 but sometimes not.

riansanderson 1y ago

tangentially related- does anyone have a good recommendation on an external CD drive that works well with macOS and has a good form factor and build quality? I have an ancient thinkpad that I use a couple of times a year _just for reading cds_ and and have considered retiring it. But all the CD drives I see on amazon look like disposable crap.

TheAmazingRace 1y ago
Anything made by Pioneer these days is a good choice. That said, Pioneer just recently exited the optical disc drive market a month or so ago, so you'll want to pick up a drive while you still can. They tend to be pricier than your generic external disc drive, but they are dead reliable, and fully compatible with software like EAC and XLD. I have the Pioneer BDR-XS07S slot loading external BluRay burner drive and it does a great job ripping audio CDs.
Synaesthesia 1y ago
The Apple superdrive
- giantrobot 1y ago
  While I've ripped hundreds of discs with mine, they do have some downsides. It can be a bitch and a half to get a disc out if it can't be read properly. Even drutil wouldn't eject such discs. There's also no way to use mini CD/DVDs with them. Not that those were ever super popular but if you have any it's an annoyance. I replaced my SuperDrive with an 5.25" internal drive in an external powered enclosure. I can always get unreadable discs out easily, have no problem with mini discs, and I'm not stuck with an extremely short USB cable. A SuperDrive isn't a bad option but there's better available.
dawnerd 1y ago
Pick up an internal drive and get a good enclosure. Way better than any of the external junk on Amazon. Better yet get one of the LG bluray drives that support ripping 4k discs. Might need to flash the firmware. That’s what I use and it’s great and really fast for plain cds as a bonus.

pflenker 1y ago

Somewhat related: some conscious artistic choices - such as writing down two tracks but delivering them as one (not sure if this is what happened here) can’t really be transferred into databases. I own a cd where one track name is a small icon depicting a heart stabbed with a rather lengthy knife. To my knowledge, this track has no canonical name. Any digital version of this cd betrays the respective author‘s interpretation of the icon. And then, of course, there’s „Love Symbol“: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Sniffnoy 1y ago
What's the CD?
- pflenker 1y ago
  The Inchtabokatables - Ultra
indrora 1y ago
How about "Naming the CDs" There's a handful of albums that MusicBrainz doesn't quite have the right cd naming for since one was labeled "LEFT" and the other "RIGHT" and not 1/2 -- there is no canonical 1/2 order.
FearNotDaniel 1y ago
> can’t really be transferred into databases Of course they can, it's up to the person designing the database schema to anticipate what is a common artistic practice and model the data accordingly. It might be that specific databases like MusicBrainz and Gracenote haven't accounted for that, but if you own the schema you can easily set up a one-to-many (parent/child) relationship between physical track and song name. One extreme example of this would be the "Lovesexy" album by (the artist formerly known as) Prince, which in its original CD form had only one track, containing 9 songs. I think the Spotify version is still faithful to this. This and many other common "conscious artistic choices" ought to be collected into a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Recorded Music", if that is not already a thing... In your example above, yes it's true that many song titles and artist names are fully and partially graphic symbols with no direct text representation (another thing Prince was fond of), but again given the prevalence of this there's no reason a smart data schema couldn't model a song or artist having a 'canonical' name that can only be represented by some graphic format along with one or more pronounceable/text-encodable alternatives (TAFKAP/Love Symbol) and so on; and of course tracking the fact that the 'preferred' identifier can change over time (Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, to mention a non-Prince example).

retrodaredevil 1y ago

A maintain my own digital music collection. The only two tools I use for maintaining the CD portion of my collection are k3b and MusicBrainz Picard. k3b can rip to flac and it will on embed metadata present on the CD itself. Then after I rip it, I add it to Picard. I use the "lookup CD" feature in Picard, which gives me a selection of releases to choose from. Among the choices, I usually see a release matching the catalog number on my CD's case. When I don't see a matching release, I will typically add the disc ID to an existing release, or I will create a new release, or sometimes even creating a new release + new release group and add the necessary metadata to MusicBrainz. I haven't tried any automatic tagging process like the ripping program the article talks about does, mostly because I want to use Picard to make sure the metadata is correct or contribute to MusicBrainz if it isn't. I like MusicBrainz a lot because applications like Plex use it very well to group release groups together and will (usually) deduplicate identical recordings so that identical tracks can share a rating. It's a really great database and is kept up to date pretty well.

mayneack 1y ago
Yeah, imo using musicbrainz/picard is great for the process of bringing something into your collection. I encounter errors like others here have mentioned, but they're straightforward to fix. Importantly, it sets up a reference to an evolving update process so changes down the line can get back to my files cleanly.
commotionfever 1y ago
since you mention Picard and wanting contribute to MusicBrainz. I'm working on a new fast tagger[1] in the spirit of Picard or beets. Just a little different and more scriptable It makes it's best attempt to match with MusicBrainz, but if there's no match it it offers links to pre-seed MusicBrainz with tools like Harmony https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag
- CharlesW 1y ago
  Harmony (https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/ https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/) is amazing, and completely changed my relationship with MusicBrainz. What are you using for tag reading/writing in Go? Robust, complete options are non-existent in JavaScript land (Deno, Bun, Node, etc.), so I ended up creating a Wasm version of TagLib with a TypeScript API.

Henchman21 1y ago

When I was building out infrastructure to support streaming at Sony Music Entertainment, it was well known that interns would input the metadata. Typos were rife and genres? Made up out of whole cloth. It feels safe to assume that the situation has improved since then, but I doubt seriously we’ll ever be free of typos ;)

lloydatkinson 1y ago
It's sad Sony put the effort into writing rootkits for music CD's but did nothing to automate, flag, fix typos for metadata...
- Henchman21 1y ago
  Agreed. I could say tons here, but it’ll suffice to say that I am wildly happy I no longer work there!
- mxuribe 1y ago
  I remember the Sony rootkits...Since then and to this day, i avoid buying anything related to Sony as best i can. Funny thing is, folks who know me know that i am not the kind of person who holds a grudge....but something about that rootkit event really brought the ire in me....one of the extremely few times where i held a grudge. So, i avoid Sony and go on with my life. I also stop buying at other companies...but for other companies for some reason i don;'t hold onto the ire...i just stop buying from them, and quietly move on...but Sony....i don't get it, but the dislike is crazy.
  - Henchman21 1y ago
    I recall a meeting where my team was asked to do some technical legwork for the implementation. To his credit, my boss stood up, said some words about ethics, and led our team out the door. It wasn’t the entire org… just the music business folks as I recall. I left shortly thereafter.
    - mxuribe 1y ago

Sniffnoy 1y ago

Man, I thought this was going to be about a decoding tool that had some edge case incorrect, but instead it was just about incorrect entries in a database that was used in place of actually decoding...

cloud8421 1y ago

I use MusicBrainz and donate every month - yeah data is not perfect, but you can go and fix it yourself if needed, and the UI is extremely functional without any frills.

Lammy 1y ago

I used to do the MusicBrainz thing with Picard and later with Beets, but I got sick of Somebody Else's Metadata because of MusicBrainz's (former?) policy where everything must be Title Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve. I prefer my tags to match the artist's choice, because I consider it a tonal indicator that helps set the mood for the work. It seems like they might not enforce that any more since the album I was going to pick on as an example is now tagged like I have it, although I also have lower-case “my bloody valentine” Artist tags on every track with Title Cased “My Bloody Valentime” Album-Artist tag for browsing in Navidrome: https://musicbrainz.org/release/1e4c282b-8b0d-4d20-9f74-175f0063d73d https://musicbrainz.org/release/1e4c282b-8b0d-4d20-9f74-175f... …but I already got out of the habit and will still just keep typing them out myself :) I also always include the catalog number in the Comment field and in brackets in my folder names to separate different releases of supposedly the same thing. Good example of why you would want to do this is the 2004 vs the 2007 releases of MM..FOOD? where the last track (Kookies) had to be redone to remove the Sesame Street samples: - 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_XcL4nYos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_XcL4nYos - 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYSwvdEfeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYSwvdEfeY Shout-out to https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ and https://fanart.tv/ https://fanart.tv/ for high-quality album art to embed.

Avamander 1y ago
I can't recall when something like that was enforced. Artistic intent is definitely something that editors and guidelines intend to preserve. Though in some cases it might be hard to determine if something is a mistake or intentional - there are incredibly weird releases.
amiga386 1y ago
> policy where everything must be Title Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve If the music artist decided how it should be on the CD sleeve, and you can show that, then you can go with that. But more often than not, the sleeve is done by the record company's graphic designers, not the music artist. https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Titles https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Titles > Album and song titles are often found in upper‐case on the back cover of CDs. For example, the album Songs of Love and Hate is written as “SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE” on the cover. This is usually the choice of a graphic designer, not the artist. So, instead of copying the title from the cover, we follow certain rules to capitalize a title. https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction_and_artist_intent https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction... > Error Correction: There are many cases of record companies incorrectly reproducing titles or even artist names, or breaking generally accepted rules of usage for stylistic purposes. In such cases it often makes sense to fix errors and standardize irregularities, valuing correct spelling, punctuation and grammar over faithfulness to the printed release cover. > Artist Intent: Artists sometimes choose to present names and titles in ways that deliberately contradict the rules of the language they're in (e.g. unorthodox spellings) and/or the MusicBrainz Style Guidelines. To describe the way we handle such choices, we use the term "artist intent." The general idea is that if an artist intended something to be written in a special way, then MusicBrainz should follow that intent. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find out what an artist intended. If you want to claim that some deviation from the Style Guidelines should be considered artist intent, the burden of proof lies on you.

KwanEsq 1y ago

Huh, once I saw the image with the discrepancies I immediately assumed 'ah, "Nothing Coming Soon" must be in the pre-gap of "Don't Need a Reason", especially with that track length, and the rip combined that into one music file', but no, turns out it just isn't defined in the disc metadata at all. Wonder if that's a (mastering?) error, given that the TITLE metadata doesn't even include it.

rconti 1y ago

> Aside from some audio tracks and a table of contents over those tracks, very little extra information is included on a disk - you've pretty much only got the artist name, album name and track names actually burned into the disk. Huh, I actually didn't think there was any metadata at all.

dhosek 1y ago
Yeah he goes on to talk about an external data source for metadata, so this statement is, as far as I know, wrong, even by the standard of what’s in this article.
- rconti 1y ago
  no, there's a part about it later, assuming we can take their word for it: (ugh, HN formatting is the _worst_) ------ Taking a look at the metadata embedded into the disk itself, we can see that track 6 is actually titled "Don't Need a Reason" on there: FILE "./06. Finish Ticket - Nothing Coming Soon.flac" WAVE TRACK 06 AUDIO TITLE "Don't Need A Reason" ISRC USDPK2300133 INDEX 01 00:00:00
KwanEsq 1y ago
Yeah audio CDs do (or at least can) carry those bare bones of metadata, which can be used by some CD players with built-in displays to display the currently playing track title etc. It's defined by the CD-Text extension[0] to the Red Book standard. I think classical releases probably make greater use of it to encode things like composer and arranger, since they are more important to that audience, but for the average popular music release you're only going to get the artist and title, and maybe the ISRC that few are going to care about/display anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-Text

dhosek 1y ago

I had always thought that the odds of doubled discs based on the TOC were unlikely, but it turns out that with discs with fewer tracks (≤4 or so), you can get duplicates quite easily.

devmor 1y ago
I wonder if this explains why som EPs I have received as ZIPs from friends get tagged incorrectly in programs like Jellyfin.

at_a_remove 1y ago

I am keeping an eye on this thread, as I plan to eventually rip my somewhat large collection, but would prefer to do it just the one time. Exact Audio Copy, the author seems to have moved on to other interests, which is a shame because I was looking for something compatible with an autoloader. And it looks like dbpoweramp is the only one left in that arena. I am allllll about the metadata. Also, a thumbnail, synced lyrics if they could be found, custom metadata for hyperlinks back to entries on Discogs and MusicBrainz, perhaps some ReplayGain values in fields on the FLAC, depending on my MP3 processing case ... but I have so many unanswered questions.

MyPasswordSucks 1y ago
> Exact Audio Copy, the author seems to have moved on to other interests, which is a shame because I was looking for something compatible with an autoloader. Nah, it's mostly just reached the stage where there's nothing left to do - all the "objective" stuff works as it should, and any feature adds would be a pretty heavy undertaking. It was updated a little less than a year ago, and when I contacted the author he was very responsive. Would it be nice to have a keyboard shortcut for proper [1] cuesheet creation (ironically, all the options except the proper one have keyboard shortcuts)? Yeah, but I've learned to live with it. Would it be nice to have super-duper tagging options? I dunno, from where I'm sitting, it seems like it'd just be duplicating a bunch of foobar2000 features for negligible gain. [1] Because nobody wants a .FLAC that starts with a few seconds of silence, inter-track gaps need to be appended to the end of the previous track, which is not how Red Book audio handles it, and means that the "proper" cuesheet format is technically a non-compliant cuesheet.
- iggldiggl 1y ago
  > Because nobody wants a .FLAC that starts with a few seconds of silence, inter-track gaps need to be appended to the end of the previous track Side digression: For regular albums, where the pregap is just two seconds of silence I can absolutely understand that and prefer to put the pregap at the end of the previous song myself. However for live albums my feelings are a bit more torn – on the one hand there is something to the music starting immediately when playing a random track, but on the other hand any stage patter that might be present in the pregap usually refers to the upcoming track, and having that incongruously stuck at the end of the preceding track is at least to me somewhat annoying during random playback, too.

dd_xplore 1y ago

I see a lot of praise for MusicBrainz, is it really that good?

lxgr 1y ago
It's infinitely better than the alternative (which is to have tracks simply be named "Track 1", "Track 2" etc.), but much worse than the situation in an alternative universe where the "Red Book" standard for CDDA directly includes CD-Text and mandates its use for all compliant publishers.

k__ 1y ago

I remember having a game CD+R. It had scratches and even holes, but somehow it worked, lol.

TylerE 1y ago
Scratches effect much less than most people think, as long as they're superficial. (For instance, dings from the case are likely fine, but run the tip of a key across the one...) Contrary to what most people expect, the data pits on a CD are much closer to the label side than the shiny side - the bottom of the disc is a clear plastic layer that as far as the optics of the drive are concerned are out of focus.

mikepavone 1y ago

This is a small point, but calling the 33-byte unit a sector in CDDA is a bit misleading and probably incorrect for the quantity being labeled. This is a channel data frame and contains 24-bytes of audio data, 1 byte of subcode data (except for the channel data frames that have sync symbols instead) and the rest is error correction. This is the smallest grouping of data in CDDA, but it's not really an individually addressable unit. 98 of these channel data frames make up a timecode frame which represents 1/75th of a second of audio and has 2352 audio data bytes, 96 subcode bytes (2 frames have sync codes instead) with the remainder being sync and error correction. Timecode frames are addressable (via the timecodes embedded in the subcode data) and are the unit referred to in the TOC. This is probably what's being called a sector here. Notably, a CD-ROM sector corresponds 1:1 with a timecode frame. Note: Red book actually just confusingly calls both of these things frames and does not use the terms "channel data frame" or "timecode frame"

dogman1050 1y ago

I've ripped hundreds of CDs and the metadata is usually ok on commercial discs. When ripping CDs I created from LP rips, I use Mp3tag to make it right.

alexchantavy 1y ago

Wait so back in the day I remember Winamp let you configure a CDDB thing and it connected to something called.. Gracenote? (Am I remembering that correctly?) iTunes desktop at some point used to handle this all for you and I assumed it was pulling from those sources under the hood. Where did MusicBrainz come from?

shermantanktop 1y ago
Gracenote is alive and well, and mostly supporting the video entertainment industry I think but with forays into adtech and other such schemes.
CharlesW 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicBrainz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicBrainz ”MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata (information about the performers, artists, songwriters, etc.) storehouse to become a structured online database for music.” More detail here: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/771/papers/ieeeIntelligentSystems/webservices/musicBrainz.pdf https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/771/papers/ieeeIntelligentSystem...

0points 1y ago

Well written. I am dealing with some similarities setting up a jellyfin server and the episode data of some series are rather incomplete. So I been contributing to tmdb for the last half year or so :)

sandreas 1y ago

Maybe for archival Purposes you could use `redumper` (https://github.com/superg/redumper https://github.com/superg/redumper) to prevent ripping mistakes. My personal workflow: - rip the audio CD via EAC with acousticID (flac) - retrieve metadata via beets in a script completely automated - convert flac to mp3 via beets inplace convert (see below) - backup the flac files to another location - self-host navidrome and use the substreamer / dsub app and smart playlists to listen "on the go" (The Apple usb-c-to-audiojack adapter is pretty decent) - transfer this via iTunes VM to my good old iPod Nano 7g as main listening device for audiobooks If anyone is looking for fast and accurate ripping hardware, recently I updated my recommended hardware list including a linked tutorial for EAC: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/ https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/ beets convert config: convert: auto: no ffmpeg: /usr/bin/ffmpeg opts: -codec:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 0 -ac 2 -ar 48000 -map_metadata 0 -movflags use_metadata_tags max_bitrate: 192 threads: 1

maeln 1y ago
~Why use MP3 instead of opus, vorbis or AAC ? All of them have (most of the time) better compression ratio (and better quality) than MP3. Is it for compatibility reason ?~ edit: Ah, I missed the ipod nano part
- nani8ot 1y ago
  iPod Nano 7th gen. does support AAC (AIFF & WAV too).
  - lxgr 1y ago
    All iPods except for the very first and second one have supported AAC out of the box, and I believe there was a firmware update even for the two that didn't. Apple didn't invent the format, but was definitely its biggest proponent from early on.
    - sandreas 1y ago
      Although the format might be superior in many ways, it has not replaced mp3 as the default format, because you can make mp3 sound pretty good and the space savings are not that important on modern devices. Interestingly the iPod Nano 6th generation I think was the first device to support fast-forward and rewind via headphone remote. That's the main reason I don't use my 512GB iFlash iPod classic 2009 mod as often as I want to, although the support for m4b (m4a+aac) audio books is pretty good. I've not tested ALAC on older iPods, which is a proprietary lossless format, but it might work on the newer more powerful ones (iPod touch)

b0a04gl 1y ago

[dead]

vkaku 1y ago

Perhaps I should create an overlay for MusicBrainz with sub-minute lag called ZombieBrainz. If you own a CD and send an edit with a $5 donation, it goes on volatile and nightly; It can go to beta instantly for $100 donations and if not it'll have to be flagged for violations. If it needs to happen instantly on stable, $10000 (generous patron tier, where I will write a blog post for this entry as well) else get to it in 3 months.

ubermonkey 1y ago

You know, I've only ever ripped with iTunes or Music on a Mac, and I've never run into this over (at this point) decades and thousands of rips. Am I just lucky?

I_dream_of_Geni 1y ago

Audio CD's are a SUPER mature technology: 43+ years old. How is this even an issue today??

lxgr 1y ago
Did you read the article? Most CDs don't include metadata, so that's commonly provided by third-party databases which both don't exactly know the original intent of the producer/publisher and can make mistakes.
- I_dream_of_Geni 1y ago
  Pretty sure HN has general rules about being polite: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article?" The shoe definitely fits..

lxgr 1y ago

> Aside from some audio tracks and a table of contents over those tracks, very little extra information is included on a disk - you've pretty much only got the artist name, album name and track names actually burned into the disk. Is that so? Was that introduced very late in the life of CDs, or why was CDDB a thing then?