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How does the CDDB online music database work?

NFS4

NFS4

No Lifer
How does it determine what a particular CD is and the name of the tracks? Now I can understand it recognizing a brand new CD that you buy in the store...but it even recognizes songs that I have compiled that go to a particular CD by me getting them directly from Napster and then burning them.

So how does it work? Is it by track length, some special data block or something?
 
I think by the CD Text

CD Text is additional information on audio tracks. Title of audio tracks and name of the artists can now be written onto a CD and afterwards be read by CD ROM drives and audio players. By playing an audio track, its title and the name of the artist will be displayed by your audio player. If your audio player does not support this feature, audio CDs containing CD Text information will be read as if they were "normal" audio CDs without any additional information. This is possible because CD Text information is written before the audio data in the lead-in area.
 
Every commercial CD has a unique identifier code stored in its Red Book TOC (I don't know if its 8bit, 16bit or whatever..) Anyway, this code is present on every copy of the CD and will even transfer when you do a CD-to-CD copy. CDDB is just a frequently updated database matching these codes to the actual CDs. This code, however, does NOT contain the actual artist, album name, track name info itself. That's why we don't have CDDB in our cars (though I'm sure the new Mercedes S600's data modem could handle it.)

CD-TEXT is different...its an extension to the Red Book standard.
 
In the past I remember users could actually make updates to cddb. Often you would find the same album with the titles typed out a lil' different. It happened a lot on DJ mixes because some labeled the artists under the DJ name while other named the artists 'Various Artists' because each vinyl is by a different artist.

I'm not sure how the db entries were submitted or by who, but there are a lot of inconsistencies. But uncjigga is right, the TOC identifies the CD, not the CD text.
 


<< In the past I remember users could actually make updates to cddb. Often you would find the same album with the titles typed out a lil' different. It happened a lot on DJ mixes because some labeled the artists under the DJ name while other named the artists 'Various Artists' because each vinyl is by a different artist.

I'm not sure how the db entries were submitted or by who, but there are a lot of inconsistencies. But uncjigga is right, the TOC identifies the CD, not the CD text. >>


But if the TOC that identifies the CD, then how is it that when I download songs one by one from different people, put them in order in Nero, and then burn them that a program like Music Match still is able to identify all the songs on the CD?
 
I think the TOC lists song times and song numbers (obviously). Are you downloading all the songs that belong to one album from different sources? That should be ok if you put them in the right order. If you try removing one song from your cd burn, I don't think it can still identify the album. I've had cd singles (two songs) that had the same TOC as other CD singles. Totally different artist/genre, but the song lengths were the same.
 
Hrm... I had a friend who said that he made his own random compilation of songs on a CD and it actually identified all the songs. I think he was just mistaken, is that what's happening to you? I think Windows actually keeps some kind of CDDB file somewhere. Bleh.. this was in win98, I can't even find it right now. Perhaps music match adds to this file. Try it in a different machine and see if it identifies properly.

edit: I think it was cdplayer.ini or something in 98 (95?) but I can't find in 2000.
 


<< Hrm... I had a friend who said that he made his own random compilation of songs on a CD and it actually identified all the songs. I think he was just mistaken, is that what's happening to you? I think Windows actually keeps some kind of CDDB file somewhere. Bleh.. this was in win98, I can't even find it right now. Perhaps music match adds to this file. Try it in a different machine and see if it identifies properly.

edit: I think it was cdplayer.ini or something in 98 (95?) but I can't find in 2000. >>


I'm saying that I can get the songs from different sources and make a CD and Music Match will identify the Album/Artist and songs list.
 


<< I'm saying that I can get the songs from different sources and make a CD and Music Match will identify the Album/Artist and songs list. >>



Yeah, TOC should be the same as long as you have all the songs in the right order and they're all the right length. If you're getting all the song titles/name on your own compilation it might be a Music Match feature.
 
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