CDDB | Gracenote | Muze | FreeDB
Database of music information
CDDB is an Internet-based service, licensed by the Gracenote® to the developers of playback software and applications, who use it to display music information, retrieved from an enormous database.
For example, when a CD is inserted in a computer’s CD drive and read by one of a number of media player applications, the album, artist, and track information is retrieved from the CDDB database and displayed on the computer screen.
CDDB allows for easy identification of CD Audio and MP3 tracks, etc.
CDDB is one of a several such database services; Freedb (www.freedb.org) and MUZE are other popular database services (www.muze. com).
A CDDB entry provides a wealth of information about the CD, divided into two categories, album data and track data.
- Album data includes album title, artist name, record label, year of released CD, genre, such credits as musicians involved and producers, ISRC, and weblink to the URL of the artist’s Internet site.
- Track data include track title, artist name, record label, year of album-released song (critical for compilation and anthology projects), credits such as musicians and producers, genre, subgenre, and segment (used to identify classical pieces that are more than one track long).
Surprising though it may sound, the information in the CDDB and similar databases can come from anyone: a record label may be the first to enter and upload information to the online database, an artist may mail a CD to Gracenote for information upload, or any fan, using iTunes or other media player, can enter information on their own screen and send it to the online database.
To maintain the integrity of the information in its database, Gracenote enforces certain naming conventions and also gives priority to information submitted by its “content partners,” typically record labels. Procopy is such an entity and we can provide the service.
Information about a CD or track is submitted through software compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems. Alternatively, the same information can be entered via an online form accessed through a login and password provided by Gracenote upon request. After the data-submission process is completed, the information is available to anyone who inserts the CD Audio on a computer CD-ROM drive.
Software applications such as iTunes connect to the Gracenote database, and the CD’s information appears on screen.
CDDB information is not physically embedded into a CD. It is linked to the CD: stored and accessed from Gracenote’s proprietary database over the Internet.
The information is retrieved through Disc Recognition Technology. This seems to work by the statistical improbability of two CDs having tunes of exactly the samelength appearing in exactly the same sequence on a disc: the very first time a CD is inserted into a computer drive and the CDDB database is accessed, the database reads the (generally) unique sequence of tunes and their lengths, and stores that unique sequence. If the statistically improbable happens, the listener may see album and content information displayed that is unrelated to the CD in the drive.
For recognition of individual tracks, Gracenote has other software that generates a “fingerprint” of some portion of the content of the music file, and thereafter associates the information about the track with that fingerprint.