iTunes - how did it know my home made disc?

quote:

Originally posted by blythe:
Is it possible for iTunes to "know" or has someone else who may have had a copy of my CD added it before both my friend and I did?

I don't know about iTunes, but EAC accesses FreeDB to lookup track names.

If the CD isn't known, then you get prompted to enter the track details for your MP3 tags.

There is an option within FreeDB that any such details will then be submitted back to FreeDB, in order to extend the database.

So, in answer to your quesion, probably yes.

cheers, Martin

Blythe someone else mentioned that they had made a recording of a vinyl record to CD, when inserted into iTunes it happily came up with the listing.

Its certainly advanced in recent months, probably dowsn to gracenote.

All I can think is gracenote tacks a sample of the music and compares. This technology has been round a while. There used to be a number you could dial on your phone, you then held it up to a speaker and the phone would call you back with the artist and album.

Should one be openly admitting to the fact that one has recorded onto tape from the radio? Then made a disk of the recording and then given a copy of said disk away?

This subject matter came up a while ago when I really wanted to discover the track names and artists on an imaginary compilation CD which I thought I'd found but which never really existed. (honest Guv)

Sadly the usual media players (and another service recommended here) could not provide any track details. I would really have liked to have owned the original CDs of some of these amazing tracks.

One couldn't help wondering if the music industry copying watchdogs couldn't use these same track recognition services to find and sue schoolkids. (or even curious old farts!)

When you put an audio CD in a Mac, iTunes reads the table of contents and notes the total number of tracks and length of each. It uses this as a fingerprint. iTunes checks its local database to see if it has any information about the inserted CD. If not, iTunes sends the table of contents over the Internet to Gracenote, where it's compared with fingerprints of some 4 million audio CDs. If a match is found, Gracenote returns the album information back to iTunes.

Users can share manually entered data with the Gracenote community for a CD that Gracenote cannot find or where Gracenote returns the wrong information. If you wan to do this then put the CD in the drive, select the CD from the source list in iTunes and choose Advanced > Submit CD Track Names.

Blythe, if somebody already did this for the CD you recorded then this is how it would recognise it. However, users shouldn't really submit the contents of personally recorded CDs - but I can't see what would stop this. That said, it was handy in that iTunes was able to give you a track listing.

Rotf

Rotf, I think most people understand how iTunes works. However it looks at table of contents, it reads track length and number of tracks, to give its finger print. For those recording from radio with fade ins and outs and from Vinyl with clicks pops and again some home remedies to cut the tracks, the fingerprint would be utterly screwed, and yet often gracenote still sorts it out, hense why I think it could be sampling a bit of each track?

In the last thread discussing this matter it was agreed (I think) that a privately produced compilation CD cannot be recognised.

One wonders how it managed to recognise a radio recording onto tape which was then converted to CD. It would seem an indelible digital label must be applied by the radio station to its transmitted material which Gracenote can recognise despite medium conversions.

Protection for DVDs and CDs is getting so good one can't even play them on one's computer now!
The common media players seem to suppose you'll automatically want to burn a copy. Rather than just listen to it while browsing. It is also becoming impossible to use Spectrum Lab software to analyse the frequency distribution on some recent CDs and DVDs.

I have not found many that the mac can't deal with, infact I only ever found one which was A blumencraft one which kind of macs the mac crash and you can't eject the disk, which was a shame.

Mmmm, it still seems amazing to me - bloody amazing!
Had it been an LP braodcast etc. it would have made a lot of sense that it might be recognised.....
Anyway, I'm glad it was 'coz I now have all the track names :-)

Its great but know one has sufficiently answered why.

"It's a kinda magic" as far as i can tell.

Sorry