[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 : 155 points
Date : 2025-06-12 15:03 UTC (1 days 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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 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.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| 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.
| mtillman wrote:
| Another example: Nick and Nora pre code films weren't on
| Netflix the last time I looked.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Even local super popular rock bands from 80s don't always
| have their entire catalog available on streaming
| services, and solo endeavors of their musicians are often
| nowhere to be seen there.
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| By contrast, before I got rid of almost all my vinyl, one
| particular sub-collection that I had was about 200 12"
| singles from the London club scene in 1981-1985. Almost
| none of the tracks ever appeared on CD or were ever
| released digitally.
|
| All of them were available on youtube, even the
| whitelabel DJ-only releases!
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I can curate my own library of _bookmarks_ within [some
| other body 's music library] without CDs; of course I can.
|
| I can do that with iTunes or Spotify or Tidal or Amazon
| Music or whatever else.
|
| But none of these bookmarks are necessarily related to _my_
| music. They are only just bookmarks that refer to music
| that might exist within the libraries that these bodies
| provide.
|
| And while all of these libraries are certainly quite vast,
| there's a fuckton of (published!) music that these
| commercial libraries do not provide.
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.)
| 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
| infl8ed wrote:
| Actually, and quite interestingly, it looks like their second
| edit (to separate the tracks) failed:
| 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/r
| elease/af4dc096-65d2-4cc5-9e0c-176d...
| amiga386 wrote:
| It did fail, because as you see, that edit's track 5 says
| "Rainclous" ... but https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458416
| was in play to change that to "Raincloud"... so
| 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
| 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
| dawnerd wrote:
| There was a thread for the drives model which I don't have
| near me at the moment. Was a kinda sketchy windows app but
| now makemkv shows libredrive.
| 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?
| pflenker wrote:
| The Inchtabokatables - Ultra
| 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.
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| > 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).
| pflenker wrote:
| It's entirely possible to come up with artistic choices which
| precisely aim to be impossible to capture. So at times it's
| not due to falsehoods someone believes, but rather the
| opposite - artists deliberately breaking the limits of what's
| currently possible. Not a direct CD example, but one vinyl
| (was it by Pink Floyd?) has a special last track, where the
| needle is redirected endlessly, making the last track
| effectively endless. Or double grooved vinyls, Track 0s on
| CDs and so on.
|
| But to stay with my example of the stabbed heart - even if
| the DB supported it, you'd still have to make choices when
| converting the icon as printed into the database, such as
| coloring.
| omoikane wrote:
| The person designing the database schema might have made a
| conscious decision _not_ to support arbitrary track names and
| layout, since the added restrictions will make the client
| side software easier to implement.
|
| But I guess it is also possible to design a schema that
| includes a lot of optional metadata, and clients only need to
| support up to certain core set of features if they choose.
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _NEVER use "Scan", basically_
|
| never use "scan" because it will never work? or because it is
| somehow destructive and will mess up your "cataloging"?
| CharlesW wrote:
| I have no doubt that it sometimes works, and would be happy
| to accept a verdict of "skill issue" if the problem is me.
|
| Scanning a Cluster _should_ (IMO) cause Picard to generate
| a series of AcoustID fingerprints /IDs from the tracks,
| then use that series to identify the best match (with extra
| points for handling missing tracks, etc.). But especially
| in the case of collections/compilations, the end result
| often resembles a transporter accident. Thankfully it's
| non-destructive, so it's straightforward to "Remove" all of
| the tracks you dragged in earlier along with the various
| albums that MusicBrainz created during the discombobulation
| process.
|
| To be clear, my overall opinion of MusicBrainz and
| MusicBrainz Picard is that they are unappreciated triumphs.
| It would be nice if Wikipedia and Internet Archive diverted
| 0.01% of their fundraising to them. Google is the primary
| hero in their story, supporting them with over $500K so
| far. https://metabrainz.org/sponsors
| lloeki wrote:
| > MusicBrainz Picard is wonderful, but has one of the most
| unintuitive "first contact" experiences I can remember.
|
| Seconded, it's the best specialised UI I've seen in a while.
|
| By "specialised" I mean it's entirely bespoke to a specific
| task and no other, with a small amount of dedicated jargon,
| like those industrial control panels full of buttons,
| toggles, and blinkenlights.
|
| At first it's completely alien and appears to do weird stuff,
| possibly counterintuitive even (the mentioned "Scan" usage+,
| "what are clusters?", "why do I even need to cluster first?",
| "how do I save changes?")
|
| But once you get the hang of it it's incredibly efficient
| with a ton of small niceties, like dragging a selection of
| entries from the left side will apply whatever candidates you
| have on the right side to the selection in order starting
| from the first.
|
| + I use scanning only when album matching fails for whatever
| reason, it does sometimes unearth entries that wouldn't
| appear otherwise.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I gave up and use Lidarr since it's a really easy interface
| ...until the metadata is missing from the API database then
| it's a hair pulling experience to learn the quirks of the
| culture that runs either of those cd databases.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| For cover art you can control it from options->options->cover
| art. There are also a couple of plugins for other sources.
|
| There are a few items in there to control if it scans
| external or overwrite. Recently went thru this as apparently
| for some reason I had totally disabled it. Think I was trying
| to speed up scanning as it would download every artwork for a
| large group into the temp folder. I usually force it to make
| an external file. I pick what it suggested 'cover'. Then use
| something like fileoptimizer to recompress the jpg/png it
| comes up with. I do that because I like to embed the images.
| And much of what is out on the net is optimized for fast
| editing not 'archive'. I use mp3tag to put it back into the
| tag.
|
| Scan is hit or miss. I have fed it whole albums and it will
| somehow find 3 other albums with some of the songs from that
| one. That could be because of how I have
| options->options->metadata->Prefered Releases set. That
| slider bar thing for some reason I can not wrap my head
| around. It is good for when you come across one of those
| items where someone else tagged it as 'weird al' (everything
| is weird al if it is funny). I have been slowly getting rid
| of that stuff but want to find the original album to buy.
| Musicbrainz can be good for that sort of thing. I have also
| had decent luck with it if I pre-add the albums then scan. It
| seems to find things better.
| riedel wrote:
| I recommend also AudioRanger for resorting and moving stuff
| into the right places. For ripping I use ExactAudioCopy, which
| supports also flac.
| prmoustache wrote:
| What does "maintain" means in that context? Once you have
| ripped your cd and stored it somewhere there is nothing to
| maintain afaik (well appart than having backups if you don't
| want to ever rip them again).
| IAmBroom wrote:
| The word implies "organize".
|
| I have thousands of text files on my computer. I don't need
| to "maintain" them (beyond backups, as you mention), but if I
| want to find one that contains a particular phrase that I
| can't quite remember the exact wording for... I'd better hope
| I stored it in a meaningful directory's subdirectory's
| subdirectory, with a meaningful title.
| retrodaredevil wrote:
| Mostly I just use Picard it for initial tagging, which
| usually only needs to happen once. Sometimes Picard has
| changes it wants to do such as updating to a higher
| resolution cover art, or to refer to a different MBID after a
| merge.
|
| Yeah, not much to maintain, but Picard does keep my tags up
| to date if necessary.
| 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!
| Henchman21 wrote:
| All that praise goes to my old boss; the rest of us were
| a bit shocked we'd been asked such a thing! But he was
| already saying no before I'd even processed the request.
| He succeeded in delaying that "project" several _years_
| -- I left in '04. IIRC this became public late '05-early
| '06?
| qingcharles wrote:
| I was doing digital ingestion for Sony in Europe and they
| sent us all those hobbled "unrippable" CDs and asked us
| to rip them for streaming. They were kinda embarrassed
| about it.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Man, I bet you guys went through a couple boxes of
| sharpies getting those ready to rip! :)
| 47282847 wrote:
| Many Plextor models were known to beat basically any copy
| protection; otherwise it was mostly luck which drive
| managed, and some lists with shared findings.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yeah, we had stacks of different drives to try and get
| the worst offenders ripped. The Plextors were our
| primaries, though.
| 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.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| I will admit that I do precisely the same with my collection!
| But I truly felt that those interns should've received a list
| to choose from, not an open text field.
| TylerE wrote:
| The biggest issue with genres is most databases treating them
| as one to one rather than one to many.
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's a real issue. I think the biggest issue with genre,
| though, is that even if people agree on a list of possible
| genre labels, there is often disagreement about what music
| belongs in which genre.
|
| This isn't a new problem at all. Even music labels often
| disagree. Back when record stores were a thing, it was
| pretty common for different stores to categorize the same
| albums differently in terms of genre. I think the only way
| to avoid it is to stick to very, very broad categories.
| "Rock", for instance, covers an amazingly broad set of
| styles.
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| As someone responsible for setting the track naming policy
| originally at a big streaming company, I can't remember what
| the policy was. I know I would be called in all the time for
| crazy shit like Aphex Twin having just a page of equations as
| track names, or I seem to remember some album by Royksopp that
| had just colors printed for the track names and no words. That
| stuff killed me.
|
| Or the team doing all the ingestion being overworked minimum
| wage high school grads and suddenly an entire semi truck turns
| up and it's just palettes of CDs completely in many various
| East Asian languages.
|
| If I had to do it over I would have two fields, one for
| whatever best represented what the CD says (and as someone
| below me points out, this was usually the publisher's artistic
| discretion and differed between the data they sent, the back of
| the CD, the track list printed on the CD and the liner notes)
| and I would have a separate field for Title Cased Titles.
| tom_ wrote:
| Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 2 had a track listing
| that was 6 pie charts, one image per slice, 1 slice per
| track. I assume it came on 3 LPs, but I had the 2 CD version,
| and there were corresponding pie charts printed on the face
| up sides of the CDs... as if it made it any clearer.
|
| I ripped them about 15 years ago and cddb came up with track
| names for them, matching the ones in its Wikipedia page (http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Ambient_Works_Volume_...).
| I wonder if we have any evidence that the mapping from tracks
| to images is remotely correct.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I came up with the first CD DB for Windows 95 just before
| it came out. I realized Media Player had an .ini file with
| the track names and so I had people on Usenet send me all
| their listings and would reintegrate it and publish it
| frequently for the first few weeks until I realized .ini
| files had a 64KB limit and that was the end of that.
|
| If I did it again, which I have planned for a long time, I
| would require citations for every track listing. Sure, it's
| a big barrier, but it'd nice to get it right where
| possible. The primary citations would generally be to the
| album cover, but in cases like the Aphex Twin insanity,
| cites to things like interviews and label demo releases etc
| could definitely be valid.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > I know I would be called in all the time for crazy shit
| like Aphex Twin having just a page of equations as track
| names, or I seem to remember some album by Royksopp that had
| just colors printed for the track names and no words. That
| stuff killed me.
|
| More creative than a QA department.
| 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.
| MyPasswordSucks wrote:
| > 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.
| dd_xplore wrote:
| I see a lot of praise for MusicBrainz, is it really that good?
| k__ wrote:
| I remember having a game CD+R.
|
| It had scratches and even holes, but somehow it worked, lol.
| TylerE wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Gracenote is alive and well, and mostly supporting the video
| entertainment industry I think but with forays into adtech and
| other such schemes.
| CharlesW wrote:
| 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/ieeeIntelligentSystem...
| 0points wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe for archival Purposes you could use `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/
|
| 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 wrote:
| ~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 wrote:
| iPod Nano 7th gen. does support AAC (AIFF & WAV too).
| sandreas wrote:
| Just compatibility and "high enough" quality. Works in my
| car, on my iPod, on my Phone, on my kitchen radio and is the
| most common format in general.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| that part in the blog where OP mentions CDs don't store song
| names at all hit me hard. all these years i thought my old sony
| player was just lazy, turns out the format never even tried.
| whole childhood spent memorizing track numbers just to play one
| damn song.
| vkaku wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Audio CD's are a SUPER mature technology: 43+ years old. How is
| this even an issue today??
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