iTunes and CD Query

[Faijer]

M'kay, kind of hit a blind spot. Checked the help menu, nothing. Checked a list of keyboard shortcuts, nothing.

Inserted a CD (The Alistair Goodwin Band, for those familiar), and it came up with an alert: This CD has two options, please select the correct one. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had this.

Well I wasn't sure which one contained what, so I just clicked on the first one. I found a few moments later that ejecting the CD and re-inserting it would only result in it loading this choice, rather than bringing up the alert again.

Any ideas how to bring up the alert again, because I believe it was the second one that contained the songs on the album.

Thanks in advance.

 

[mkrishnan]

What happens when you put the CD in, select the CD in the left-hand pane of iTunes (so that the songs appear on the right), highlight all the items, and then select Advanced -> Get CD Track Names?

Or alternatively, if you ripped the songs, select the entire album (so that all the songs and only the songs from the CD are visible in the bottom of the browser) from the iTunes library, again highlight all of them, and then do the same.

 

[Faijer]

Ahh, that did it. Thanks a lot. I had no idea that's what it did...

 

[mkrishnan]

The CD track names are identified by looking at a database on the internet called Gracenote / CDDB that identifies CDs by the sequence of lengths of the songs. I believe they do it at the level of individual samples (at the 44.1 kHz that CDs use). It is very rare that two CDs will contain a sequence of songs of exactly the same length, so it is very rare that the database will fail to find a unique solution. In case it does, it will ask you which one matches the CD you have.

The second thing that happens is that sometimes, two submissions of names for the *same* CD, which are slightly different, have not been judged in terms of accuracy or pooled, or for some other reason are both possibly valid. And then iTunes lets you pick which one you want (this is probably what happened).

The most common example I've seen is that Asian artists who are also popular outside of their home countries sometimes have entries in more than one script (e.g. a Utada Hikaru CD may have one entry with her name and some of the track names in Japanese, and then there might also be a version where her name is spelled in Roman characters as I have done here).

Glad it got solved, though!