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iTunes CDDB GRACENOTE IS SHOCKING!!!!

Z

zainjetha

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 11, 2007
931
2
hey

i am really shocked with iTunes. I have just bought my mother an 160GB Classic and am starting to rip her entire music collection which is at least 100CDs.. however sometimes for albums iTunes gets mixed up with disc 1 and disc 2 and labels them wrong and sometimes does [disc 1] and (disc 2)...

it should be consistent not mixing brackets... i have had to edit the tags manually..

anybody else having same proble??
 
Yeah it does that all the time. Mainly because it's data is created by user submissions which are going to vary in their quality and consistency. Once you've corrected them you can choose 'Submit CD Track Names' from the 'Advanced' menu, then other people can benefit from your corrections.

Why it doesn't tie into the ITMS, as far as I can tell, is a mystery.
 
I started ripping my CD'd in iTunes before I had a broadband connection to the internet so I entered a fair lot of CD data manually. I find it a good serviceand I don't bother enterring/editing wrong or sufficient data. I also scanned a lot of album art myself since I do not always like the quality of the downloaded image.
 
I agree with you but i would like to point out that the database is not actually a product of apple or itunes, its a database run by a company called 'Gracenote' (recently purchased by Sony!!!).

Any inconsistencies are a fault of gracenote....

...with a possible itunes bug concerning disc 1 and 2 mixups!

:D
 
I don't know if you'd tried importing info from classical CDs, but the information there is usually extremely inconsistent and requires a lot of manual adjustment.
 
When you think about it, Gracenote is quite a remarkable thing. It figures out the name of the album and the titles of the tracks on your CD using an algorithm based upon the number, order and length of the tracks. It's amazing how well it works, considering the highly imperfect method it's forced to use.
 
I only use gracenote for nonclassical stuff. I ended up having to tweak the classical info 95% of the time so now I just do it myself from the paperwork in the CD box. On balance I think it takes less time. And far less aggravation.

However, if I were ripping a very big collection from scratch, I'd probably take whatever gracenote offered and then start coding one of the fields I don't use very often for classical music -- like sticking a one star into rating-- with a special code meaning to me "Do the track info over."

Then sort those guys out into a big smart playlist of all tracks with one star, and fix them at your leisure, and take the star out when you're happy how a particular CD's tracks finally look. Fun to watch the smart playlist shrink!

I'm doing this with some emusic track descriptions I didn't care for.
 
Gracenote's weird decisions about music genres

when I import a CD into iTunes I often wonder how the guys at Gracenote decide the music genre for a certain Audio-CD. Just two strange examples:

Interpret Album Genre
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nils Landgren Funk Unit Live in Stockholm R&B
Beatles White Album Rock

I would associate Nils Landgren with Jazz and Beatles more with Pop, but they also produced Music on this album which could as well called Rock. But to label Nils Landgren as R&B and thus put his music on a niveau with dull bedroom music is outrageous.
 
tomasio said:
when I import a CD into iTunes I often wonder how the guys at Gracenote decide the music genre for a certain Audio-CD.
Click to expand...

Its not gracenote. Its the iTunes users who make the submissions not knowing what genre it should be.
 
I always thought Gracenote CDDC was maintained solely by Gracenote, which is why the database pales in comparison (in terms of quantity) to say, freedb.org
 
jmmtn4aj said:
I always thought Gracenote CDDC was maintained solely by Gracenote, which is why the database pales in comparison (in terms of quantity) to say, freedb.org
Click to expand...

Nope look in the advanced menu in itunes. You will see a Submit track names option.
 
jmmtn4aj said:
I always thought Gracenote CDDC was maintained solely by Gracenote, which is why the database pales in comparison (in terms of quantity) to say, freedb.org
Click to expand...

Gracenote is owned by Sony. I've never had a single issue with Gracenote's matching, and I buy some pretty obscure stuff. How is freedb.org any better?
 
Loge said:
I don't know if you'd tried importing info from classical CDs, but the information there is usually extremely inconsistent and requires a lot of manual adjustment.
Click to expand...

I will say, though, that they've been significantly better at classical over the years. I recently ripped a few dozen of my classical discs and only had to make minimal changes. I was quite surprised. I don't think it completely botched any of my discs.
 
Does CDDB use the same tech as MusicBrainz (iEatBrainz for Mac)?

I've never had any problem with thier (re) tags.

Also this reminds me of when AudioScrobbler (now Last.fm) revamped thier site and went through about six or seven months of music data edititng to clean up everybodys slightly different tags. Perhaps Gracenote just hasn't been upgraded since its original writing.
 
Fiveos22 said:
Does CDDB use the same tech as MusicBrainz (iEatBrainz for Mac)?

I've never had any problem with thier (re) tags.

Also this reminds me of when AudioScrobbler (now Last.fm) revamped thier site and went through about six or seven months of music data edititng to clean up everybodys slightly different tags. Perhaps Gracenote just hasn't been upgraded since its original writing.
Click to expand...

I was a big Jaikoz/MusicBrainz fan until I let it "update" the tags on a 5000+ file library. The amount of editing was so extensive that I blew it all away and restored everything from the pre-Jaikoz state. It was a real mess.

MacDann
 
There's an old axiom in programming: garbage in, garbage out.

Some stoner or frat boy typing with fat fingers their Limp Bizkit collection with wrong info gets stuffed into the database with the OCD Audiophile meticulously entering every letter exactly as in the liner notes.

These "open" systems work best if more people submit correct/clean data than the stoners/frat boys with fat fingers. Sadly reality is often the worst case scenario.

I'm amazed no new Audio CD format was created with a small strip of song/album name data on the edge of an audio CD so this kind of thing would be a non-issue.

To paraphrase some numbskull IT guy from on recent DaringFireball, providing a modern audio CD with song/album info on the disc would be "... a great user experience, but thats all."

I haven't bought a CD in years, and have more music than ever from iTunes, stuff like this is why.
 
Sayer said:
I'm amazed no new Audio CD format was created with a small strip of song/album name data on the edge of an audio CD so this kind of thing would be a non-issue.
Click to expand...

There is, it's called CD-Text. iTunes can write CD's with this data, but I'm not sure if it can read them or not.

I don't see it that often on CDs I buy though.
 
Apple should provide a way to pull song tags from the iTunes Music Store. The tags there are usually dead on, or at least only require minor tweaking. CDDB sucks, but it's (only just) better than nothing.
 
Gracenote is not great, but freedb isn't pretty either. Like an earlier poster said, "garbage in, garbage out."

iTunes can create CDs with CD-Text, but it cannot read that data.
 
I am glad I am not the only one who remembers sitting there and typing all the tags in manually…

Gracenote does a pretty good job in my experience and often gives an list of options should there be more than one match.
 
elppa said:
I am the only one who remembers sitting there and typing all the tags in manually…
Click to expand...

Oh man, don't remind me. Many years ago (before iTunes), I ripped a bunch of my CDs and put them on a CD--about 16 CDs worth of mp3s at 160kbps. None of them were tagged. A few years later when I imported them all to iTunes, I had to do all the tags manually. It was a nightmare.
 
I've wasted (yep, knowingly wasted) days upon days upon days of manually editing tags on my MP3s . Around the beginning of last year I decided I didn't want to deal with it anymore and I got rid of my CDs and have bought on iTunes exclusively. Having the iPhone and an iPod which I use in my car, it's important to have accurate tagging data. Not to mention, I can't imagine having an iTunes library filled with "Track 1", "Track 2" titles and so forth!
 
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