Dec 22nd 03
iTunes Compatibility Glitch?
My sister and I are both huge fans of iTunes, her of the Windows version, me of the faithful Mac version. We spent the night burning some CDs for each other so we could exchange songs from each other’s libraries. To both of our dismay, when we stuck the other’s CDs in our own computers, iTunes failed to recognize any of the CD information, such as artist, track name, and so forth. It’s a huge bummer having to go through and fill in the track info for each and every song. My sister spent about an hour copying down song and album names and then running back to her room to tediously enter it into iTunes.
Has anyone else experienced this, or is it just us? If it is a glitch, and Apple, you’re reading this, you might want to look into it.
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brian w on Dec 22nd 03
Audio CDs don’t have track information and such encoded into them; that information gets downloaded by your player from a service like Gracenote’s CDDB… I think iTunes doesn’t upload info to the CDDB on discs you make yourself from playlists as it would “pollute” the database with bajillions of homemade mixes. When you burn your own CD you *can* upload the track info yourself (it’s in the Advanced menu, I think). Or, if you were to make MP3/data CDs, the information would be preserved as that’s stored right in the MP3 files themselves.
Adam Polselli on Dec 22nd 03
Yes, I know a little about the CDDB, but why is it that when I stick one of those CDs back into my own computer, iTunes recognizes all of the track information on it?
brian w on Dec 22nd 03
I suppose iTunes could be putting the info into its own database as if it had been pulled from the CDDB… I guess in future just do “Submit CD Track Names”, then give the CD to your sister, then have her do “Get CD Track Names”. Not as much fun as sneakernetting it, though ;)
Adam Polselli on Dec 22nd 03
Great! Thanks for the tip, Brian!
Colin D. Devroe on Dec 23rd 03
Burn a CD with iTunes, then, put it back into a computer running iTunes (mac or windows) – and import it. It will mess up the order of the songs, as well as (not all the time) not bring in the correct CDDB information.
Possibly another measure to keep people from burning and importing endlessly. I use the “share” method, and everything works perfectly. So I will stick to that.
Hadley Stern on Jan 9th 04
Another option is to burn an mp3 cd instead of an audio cd. I’m pretty sure the track info, etc remains when you burn an mp3 cd, plus you can fit many more tracks on it!
jazer on Jan 13th 04
That’s an excellent idea, Hadley. Even if you haven’t submitted the track info to CDDB, your computer stores it — that’s why it remembers when you play the disc in your machine. I remember the AppleCD player doing this back in OS 8…
Wouter on Feb 6th 04
There’s a handy app for OSX called iCDc that can search more servers to get cd information,
you can download it here: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/12568
hope that helps..
Brian Berneker on Mar 27th 04
Another way to preserve the ID tags is to simply burn the CD as an MP3 data CD. iTunes will be able to retrieve all of the information from the MP3s once they’ve been updated and indexed by iTunes, including volume leveling information. The only drawback of course is that the CD will not play in a regular CD player, but with all the new MP3 compatible decks out there, this isn’t THAT much of a problem. Besides blank CDs are cheap – you can make both versions.
All you have to do is go into the iTunes burn settings and it will have a number of options.
Barb S on Apr 14th 04
HI, I just came across your site and you seeme to know alot about cddb. I’m having a difficult time getting started..
I’m an indie artsist and a year ago I had sent cddb an email saying their db was labelling my song with incorrect info all around. When I clicked on cddb from itunes it searched teh cddb database and renamed my very own song to be someone elses but it’s still my song! ugh! So.. how do I get through to Cddb to correct it?
a)I can’t seem to get their attention
b) how do I add new info from new cds and mp3s to the cddb? Itunes has thefunction available but when I pull down the menu but it won’t let me click on it.
Also do I have to put any info in the file before I duplicate the cd’s?
and finally……
when I converted teh aiff files from my cd to mp3 in itunes I also checked the little “convert ID tags box and I clicked onok , but then nothing and when I opned the box again it showed as if it hadn’t done it. huh?
any ideas?
thanks
BArb