How To Create My Name Dj Song

What's the Name of That Song?

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

I've recently been ripping some fairly obscure—and some not so obscure—CDs from my collection onto my PC, using both iTunes and the recent beta of Windows Media Player 11. Along the way, I've uncovered annoying anomalies in both apps in the way they retrieve information from their respective CD information databases.

Over the years, I've been gradually ripping my CD collection. The situation today, when it comes to retrieving information about music CDs, is considerably better than the early days of CDDB (now Gracenote.) But it's still far from perfect.

Now that I've got a pretty good setup for broadcasting digital music around the house, I've wanted to make the music more widely available to other family members. This means moving a lot of the classical music CDs we have onto the hard drive, since my wife Jan is a big classical music buff.

For various reasons, I rip using both iTunes and Windows Media Player, using each player's respective lossless codec. Both seem to handle CD data differently. Apple's iTunes uses the aforementioned Gracenote database. Microsoft operates its own CD information database.

There also seem to be glitches in both, in certain cases. Take for example Gorecki's Symphony No. 3. When you first insert the CD, Windows Media Player 11 doesn't recognize the content. But if you manually tell WMP11 to retrieve the CD information, you get a complete listing:

Gorecki

On the other hand, iTunes immediately recognized the CD and identified the tracks and label correctly. However, it couldn't supply album art. When you try to manually get the album art, there seems to be none available:

Gorecki

Ironically, I added the album art to iTunes by copying the bitmap that had been stored in the Windows Media Player 11 library.

Let's get even more obscure. My wife's aunt, Enid Katahn, is a classical pianist who has had a number of CDs published by smaller labels. I ripped a CD of Pierre DuBois compositions played by Katahn into both players. Once again, iTunes correctly identified the CD, artist and track information—but no artwork.

WMP11 was completely baffled:

What

When I manually tried to add the album information, WMP11's service still was unhappy. Then, on a whim, I tried searching for the album info by artist name:

Who

So let's click through the "Next" button and see what we find:

Something

Clicking on the Dubois Music for Piano entry and pressing next yields what we need:

Score!

So why couldn't Windows Media Player identify the CD when it was inserted? Inquiring minds would like to know.

I had similar results with less-obscure classical CDs. For example, let's look at Telemann: Suites Concerto in D Major:

This is Not the Right Answer!

But when I manually searched the database, the correct information popped up:

Okay, This is Right

Once again, iTunes found the correct CD, but lacked album art:

iTunes Guesses Right Again

Now let's dig into my checkered musical past. I have a few guilty pleasures, and I'm admitting to the entire world that I have a problem. It's embarrassing, I know, but there it is: I have a CD of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Works Vol. 1, one of the most pompous, overblown pieces of progressive rock from an era of overblown, pompous progressive rock. This is definitely a guilty pleasure.

iTunes Sorta Gets Works Right

Apple's software gets all the tracks right from both CDs (it's a two-parter), but I had to add the "(live)" tag to distinguish the extra live tracks from the studio tracks. (The live tracks weren't on the original version of Works Vol. 1.

Microsoft manages to mangle the CD information in a different way:

CD2: Album Art, No Songs

That's right, we have no song data, but the album art is correct!

Actually, I'm being a little unfair here. The Microsoft database recognized CD 1 properly, but included all the song information from both CDs, even though I had only ripped CD1. When I inserted CD2, the screenshot above appeared.

I had to manually split out the songs that were on CD2 from the CD1 list, which contained all the songs. In fact, I could have just left in one listing. But the Microsoft database seemed to contain data from an earlier version of Works Vol.1, since the added live tracks were unidentified. I had to manually add those.

Pointer Graphic for Fingerlinks Read about getting audiophile sound wirelessly throughout your home.

I can certainly understand the difficulties inherent in the sort of pattern recognition needed to ID CDs properly, since music CDs don't have metadata information stored on them. But you'd think that the record publishers would actually supply the correct information to Gracenote or Microsoft… but then, maybe not. The curmudgeons at the RIAA probably think that this encourages piracy.

Those are just a few of my problems. There was the time WMP10 ripped a Mark Knopfler CD (Sailing to Philadelphia) and proceeded to create five or six different entries, with one or two songs, for each of the different artists who worked with Knopfler. So if you searched for "Mark Knopfler," you'd only find two songs from that album.

What's the name of that song again?

This Week on ExtremeTech
I'm taking off on vacation for the next three weeks, heading out to England and Scotland with the family. So I'm leaving the inmates to run the asylum while I'm gone. But we've got some great stuff coming up.

Jeremy Atkinson has been spending quality time with some nifty extensions for Photoshop, and shares his findings. Jason Cross attempts to answer the question: What exactly is DirectX 10? Meanwhile Victor Loh takes on yet another NAS storage device. Finally, we'll be announcing the first weekly case mod winner this Friday.

Be sure to check out ExtremeTech's weekly podcast. And speaking of inmates in an asylum, don't forget to watch the latest DL.TV, with those nutty guys, Patrick Norton and Robert Heron.