Using CDDB to Fill ID3 Information in Existing MP3s?

masonbrown asks: "I've got about 2000 songs in my MP3 collection, using iTunes on the Mac. I'd love to fill in the empty ID3 tags such as Album Title, Date, etc. automatically from something like CDDB. Is there any way to automate this after the song is already in MP3 format (like going by Artist and Song Title)?"

Comments

Tag&Rename does this

[Alrescha]

Tag & Rename is a relative cheap program for mass editing of ID3 tags. One of it's many features is that if you have a directory that contains all of the tracks of one album, in order, it will go to CDDB and retrieve the album/track information. It will of course create ID3 tags from this information if you desire.

The user interface takes a little getting used to, and it's a Windows program, and it's payware, but I had to respond to all the folks who say "it can't be done". Tag&Rename does it.

http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm

A.

easy, assuming the MP3s are whole ripped albums

[tristan-b]

iTunes does have the ability to fill in missing information in some situations. For example, if you have an entire CD you ripped while offline, select the tracks and select "Get CD Track Names" from the Advanced menu. Everything from CDDB will be filled in, even if the songs still have "track1" etc as their names. Not sure if it can account for songs ripped from another encoder/incomplete albums.

Use MP3 Rage

[sekalreed]

MP3 Rage will allow you to not only get info from CDDB for already ripped MP3s, but handle all sorts of other tagging and renaming. Check it out

Only 2000?

[teridon]

You probably want to use Applescript for this. Check out this page for a buttload of iTunes applescripts. For example the "Get CDDB Track Names" script will tag the selected tracks in iTunes with info from a CDDB webpage (that you searched for). And you can use the built-in applescripts to search the CDDB.

But honestly, with only 2000 songs, it would probably be less work to do it yourself, especially if you can use iTunes multiple-edit mode on tracks from the same album.

Re:Can't do it.... yet it's done

[wdr1]

Sure, you aren't going to get every invalid version, but who wants that anyway? For clean rips, you should be able to narrow the range down a lot. No, it won't be one-to-one like a CD, but that's okay too.

For someone who's done it already, check out MoodLogic. Hooks in with winamp too.

-Bill

Re:you should know how it works

[GMontag451]

CDDB works by doing a simple lookup of the CD's ID (burned in ) and then querys the CDDB database for what it thinks should the track names and other info

Um... no. There is no "CD ID number" burned into every CD. CDDB works by assuming that the track lengths are unique to a CD, which almost always works. That is why if you have the MP3s and you burn them to a CD, you can sometimes get CDDB to recognize it. Of course, that only works if all the different people you got your MP3s from ripped them with the same conventions, i.e. do you include the song gap, and if so, at the beginning or the end, etc.

Re:you should know how it works

[nathanh]

CDDB works by doing a simple lookup of the CD's ID (burned in )

What total rot. There's no such thing as a "CD ID". The CDDB ID is a one-way hash of the track lengths. Here is a comment from a script I wrote a few years ago.

# The cddb disc id looks like this: sum the digits of each track's
# starting point in seconds, shove that in the high byte; find the
# total _playing_ time (subtract leadins) and put into the 2nd and
# 3rd bytes; put the number of tracks in the low byte. The playing
# time can't exceed approx 80 mins, so it will never overflow. The
# summation of digits can overflow so the specs require the modulo
# 255 first (not bitwise-and like you'd expect, weird huh).

It might be possible to create a CDDB ID from a full album of MP3s. But I think there's no hope if you have random MP3s from incomplete albums.

Re:CDDB? Shouldn't we be using freedb instead?

[Lars -1]

Whether of not Gracenote hijacked anything depends on you point of view.

IIRC, the whole thing went like this:

Ti Kan and Steve Scherf defined the protocol and made a server. People started to contribute the data. At some point, Ti Kan (I might be mistaken in this) started to commercialize the service, either by selling the data to a company, or by founding a company himself. Gradually, the new company started bugging makers of mp3-software to only include support for cddb, thus practicing unfair methods to support cddb. The methods included things like "either you only support cddb, or you will not support cddb at all."

So the service started as free, then turned into a commercial service. At the same time, the free service was hindered.

About that It's not your data, it belongs to the songwriters and record companies. You just re-typed it, big frigging deal.:

Again, this depends on you view. Of course, you're just writing down information which others have written. The point is that the value of the data consists not of the information itself, but of the availability through a service like freedb/cddb. Thus Gracenote did hijack the data. Not the contents, but the value. The value is the time of the thousands of people who typed in the information.


Lars

Sure, I do this all the time

[treat]

Using a program called "mp3ascd" to generate the CDDB ID, and another program called "rebot" to do the renaming based on the ID. (Both found on freshmeat). Not the best software in the world, and I had to make a shell script to glue them together. But it is entirely possible.

Re:music recognition?

[chrissam]

I've used a program called ID3Man which does just this. I don't know if it's the same on you used -- probably not, since these guys have only been around for a year or so. My experience with ID3Man was mixed -- it's great for "popular" albums which have made it into their database, but the less volume-selling stuff like some classical and jazz are less well-recognized by their system. Definitely worth a look though.