[HN Gopher] Why does my ripped CD have messed up track names? An...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Why does my ripped CD have messed up track names? And why is one
       track missing?
        
       Author : surprisetalk
       Score  : 76 points
       Date   : 2025-06-12 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.akpain.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.akpain.net)
        
       | JohnFen wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
             | Isn't that still a labor-saving starting point?
        
               | setr wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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 wrote:
               | 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
        
           | lksaar wrote:
           | your best shout for jp cds is hoping someone added them on
           | discogs
        
             | bananalychee wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | GauntletWizard wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | > 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 wrote:
           | There are userscripts to automatically do this from sources
           | like bandcamp: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Guides/Userscripts
        
           | JohnFen wrote:
           | > 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | Never worked fine for me, at least not fine enough to trust
           | it.
        
           | jandrese wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | Avamander wrote:
             | It's used as the basis in a _lot_ of places. So fixing
             | errors fixes them in a lot of other websites (and
             | infoboxes).
        
             | cloud8421 wrote:
             | Note that the scope of the project goes beyond CDs, it's a
             | catalogue for pretty much any format where you can play
             | music.
        
       | egypturnash wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | Still running and still doing great! Some of us still curate a
         | local music library instead of streaming ;)
        
           | masklinn wrote:
           | You can curate a music library without ripping CDs tho.
        
             | JohnFen wrote:
             | 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 wrote:
               | What kind of music?
        
               | mtillman wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | JohnFen wrote:
               | A wide range, actually. It's more about the time period
               | and artists than musical style. If it's earlier than the
               | 90s and/or from an artist who wasn't big on the charts,
               | it gets more likely that they're not available except on
               | used CD.
               | 
               | In that sense, the depth and variety of good music that
               | is available has been shrinking for a long while now. The
               | advent of streaming seems to have made it worse.
        
             | ZeroGravitas wrote:
             | MusicBrainz has (or at least had) an acoustic fingerprint
             | system for processing audio files too.
        
               | Avamander wrote:
               | This is the part that tends to have the most mistakes, if
               | used. It's generally better to provide minimal info
               | manually if the CD wasn't identified by its ID.
        
             | piperswe wrote:
             | Indeed! About half of my new music acquisition is on CD,
             | the other half is Bandcamp/Qobuz/7Digital.
        
           | egypturnash wrote:
           | I curate my own library too but it's pretty much all off of
           | Bandcamp. I don't even own a CD drive I could rip with any
           | more.
        
             | pavon wrote:
             | Even with digital releases, MusicBrainz often has more
             | detailed metadata than the original files. And if you have
             | a mixed library of rips and digital purchases, it is nice
             | to use a tagger like Picard to enforce consistent directory
             | structure and filenaming.
        
         | OkayPhysicist wrote:
         | Seeing a Mastodon link on a clearly hand-written HTML site is
         | neat.
        
       | Asmod4n wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | trentnix wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | asciimov wrote:
         | Of course Sony was, because they own the patent for it.
         | 
         | The reason other labels, and most cd units, don't use CD-Text
         | is companies don't want to pay for the license.
        
       | piperswe wrote:
       | > 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 wrote:
         | 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
        
         | Avamander wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | The Apple superdrive
        
           | giantrobot wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | aspenmayer wrote:
           | > Might need to flash the firmware.
           | 
           | I'm a fan of LibreDrive, but have you heard about any similar
           | firmwares for this purpose?
           | 
           | More info about LibreDrive on the forum that hosts discussion
           | about it and tools that it works with:
           | 
           | https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18856
        
         | echelon_musk wrote:
         | When I wanted one for ripping music CDs to my M1 Mac I bought
         | the cheapest used USB to CD/DVD drive on eBay. It's a LITE-ON
         | eUAU108 and hasn't failed me.
        
         | eisa01 wrote:
         | I tried buying a noname drive from AliExpress, and the drive
         | wouldn't rip correctly with XLD...
         | 
         | You could rather salvage the drive from an old MacBook, works
         | great with a cheap adapter
        
         | dhosek wrote:
         | I bought this Pioneer drive
         | 
         | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0BN66KFV1/donhosek
         | 
         | last year after having two consecutive drives crap out on me
         | with both not wanting to eject discs or acknowledge discs that
         | were in the drive and it has worked perfectly for me for this
         | year. It has my strong endorsement..
        
       | pflenker wrote:
       | 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)
        
         | Sniffnoy wrote:
         | What's the CD?
        
         | indrora wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | retrodaredevil wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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
        
           | CharlesW wrote:
           | Harmony (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.
        
             | commotionfever wrote:
             | haha that's funny! I made a WASM TagLib for Go
             | 
             | https://github.com/sentriz/go-taglib
        
               | CharlesW wrote:
               | Cooool, I love that you arrived at the same conclusion!
               | Mine's not ready for its ShowHN, but as an enthusiast,
               | I'm super-excited to dig into yours. Very nice work!
        
         | CharlesW wrote:
         | MusicBrainz Picard is wonderful, but has one of the most
         | unintuitive "first contact" experiences I can remember. If
         | you're not sure how to get started, try this:
         | 
         | * Drag your album folders (one at a time so it doesn't get
         | confused) into the pane that initially shows "Unclustered Files
         | (0)" and "Clusters (0)".
         | 
         | * Select the "Clusters" folder in that pane and click "Lookup".
         | This will find any close matches, and in my experience works
         | ~25% of the time.
         | 
         | * For albums that weren't auto-matched, right-click the album
         | folder name and choose "Search for similar albums...". As long
         | as you're sorting by "Score", often you'll find a reasonably-
         | good match in the top 5 options.
         | 
         | * NEVER use "Scan", basically.
         | 
         | For matched albums, carefully review things like album covers,
         | titles, etc. before you "Save" the updated metadata. After
         | using it to rebuild my personal music library, including ~200
         | contributions to the MusicBrainz database, I still haven't
         | cracked (for example) how to stop Picard from defaultly
         | replacing a perfect, 1500px album cover with a less-good,
         | 1000px cover from its database.
        
       | Henchman21 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | Agreed. I could say tons here, but it'll suffice to say that
           | I am wildly happy I no longer work there!
        
           | mxuribe wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
             | 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 wrote:
               | I highly commend you, your boss, and any others who stood
               | up or otherwise rebelled against the despicable Sony
               | leaders who wanted this to be done. I can only imagine
               | that it would not have been easy. My appreciation goes
               | out to you, your boss, and the rest of the team...and i
               | only wish there were more folks like you in the world!
               | For that, thank you sincerely!
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | > genres? Made up out of whole cloth.
         | 
         | The problem with genre remains entirely unsolved across the
         | board. The solution I use in my collection is to do what
         | everyone else seems to do: make them up out of whole cloth.
         | Because I'm the only one making them up, it means my labeling
         | is at least internally consistent.
        
       | Sniffnoy wrote:
       | 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...
        
       | Lammy wrote:
       | 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-4d20-9f74-175f...
       | 
       | ...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
       | 
       | - 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYSwvdEfeY
       | 
       | Shout-out to https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ and
       | https://fanart.tv/ for high-quality album art to embed.
        
         | Avamander wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | > 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
         | 
         | > 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...
         | 
         | > 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.
        
           | ItsHarper wrote:
           | Seems reasonable. I'd think this should be pretty
           | straightforward for songs new enough to be released online.
           | If it's capitalized a certain way on Spotify, that's almost
           | certainly what the artist intended.
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | > MusicBrainz's (former?) policy where everything must be Title
         | Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve.
         | 
         | Is that why that happens? It was always a baffling thing to me
         | and required manual correction (and is one of the sorts of
         | errors that made MusicBrainz less useful).
        
           | pavon wrote:
           | Part of the difficulty is that artists/labels aren't always
           | consistent about the formatting of song titles. Its not
           | uncommon for the capitalization to vary between the back
           | cover of the CD, the printing on the CD itself and the liner
           | notes. And then you have variations between releases of the
           | same CD, and digital releases where the file metadata, and
           | the store listing, and the artist website also all vary. So I
           | can't blame MusicBrainz for choosing to normalize by default.
           | Ideally, you could use normalized case for the Recording and
           | Work song titles, and then stylized for the Release song
           | titles, but most people don't go to that level of detail when
           | entering songs.
        
             | JohnFen wrote:
             | Oh, I understand the problem, and I don't blame them
             | either. However, it is a part of why these services stopped
             | being useful to me.
        
       | cloud8421 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | KwanEsq wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | > 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
         | 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
        
       | dhosek wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | dd_xplore wrote:
       | I see a lot of praise for MusicBrainz, is it really that good?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-06-12 23:00 UTC)