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

mp3 butler

[eyez]

A long time ago I wrote a program which can, Among other things, re-tag mp3s based on the filename. This isn't exactly CDDB, but it's a start.

It's a perl program, so it Should run on OS X without modification, so long as you've got it's perl module requirements taken care of.

The program is called The MP3 Butler, and you can get it from http://babblica.net/mp3butler.

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.

CDDB? Shouldn't we be using freedb instead?

[WIAKywbfatw]

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past two years you'd know that CDDB has been hijacked by Gracenote who've turned what was a nice, cooperative development, steadily built up by thousands of unpaid users into a private, commercial venture.

Nowadays, if you're developing commercial software that accesses the CDDB database you have to pony up licensing fees or look elsewhere.

That elsewhere is freedb. Check it out and use it instead of using CDDB.

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

[tswinzig]

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past two years you'd know that CDDB [cddb.com] has been hijacked by Gracenote who've turned what was a nice, cooperative development, steadily built up by thousands of unpaid users into a private, commercial venture

And who provided the service of hosting this data and providing network access to it all these years, for free? Gracenote.

I'm so sick of this B.S. argument, "they hijacked our data!"

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

2. You provided a service to Gracenote -- you retyped the information. In exchange, you were provided a service by Gracenote, free access to their index of CD information. On average, I would wager people took WAY more than they gave.

It's fine to promote a free service like freedb. I use it. But please for chrissakes stop complaining about gracenote, they didn't hijack anything!

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

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:A common mistake

[Sabriel]

But then some yutz comes along and, like a fresh-hatched cuckoo, opens his mouth wide and peeps, "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" Thanks, but I have no particular interest in feeding leeches.

The dude asked for help. If you can't or won't help, leave it at that. Ranting at him for being a sheep not only doesn't help him, it hurts you. Someday you might need a wool coat to help keep out the cold.

If you want to understand the preceding command, RTFM. And if you want to accomplish this task on Windows 2000, pay somebody. Linux is an OS for builders, for creators, for makers of things. Windows is an OS for consumers. If you want to act like a consumer, then get out that credit card.

Windows is an OS for people who are builders, creators and makers of things IN FIELDS OTHER THAN PROGRAMMING! There are plenty of folks too busy working at their own specialties to learn ours, from farmers to firefighters. The "but it is so simple for ME" attitude is one more reason why Linux is having such a hard slog at displacing Windows.

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.