Looking for Program to identify songs on a Mix CD

Factual Questions
1

I’m wondering if such a program exists. A while back, I made several “mix” CDs from songs I’d ripped from my CD collection. At the time, I didn’t think it was important to create a track list for these new Mix CDs, so I didn’t bother.

Now I’m getting to the point where I’m confusing which songs are on which mix CDs, and so I’d like to see if there’s a program that can identify the songs on a mix CD from the CD itself. I know you can do this with “store-bought” albums using CDDB services… is it possilbe for a mix CD?

Thanks in advance…

2

I’ve never heard of one but… I used to burn mix CDs with Roxio’s Easy Media Creator and it would always remember the track listing of the mixes. (Not much help after the fact, but if there’s no answer for this, it might be a good solution going forward.)

3

Musicbrainz might help ID mp3 files ripped from the mix CD
http://musicbrainz.org/

I wouldn’t expect it to be right every time though. It’s a borderline magical program, but still makes a lot of mistakes.

4

As a general rule, if you don’t type in the song titles and artists at the time of burning the CD, there is no CD Text on the disc, and all tracks on it will be identified as Track01, Track02 etc. by all players I know about. Most factory CDs have no CD text. True, there are CDDB entries for whole CDs, but this is accomplished through the drive reading the CD’s bar code and fetching the data for that bar code from CDDB.

Exact Audio Copy (a free utility) will allow you to create a database of the contents of all your CDs, but again, you must type in all the names. It will create database entries for unnamed, unlabeled CDs that weren’t burned with CD Text, but only after you enter the names. And if you want to see the names, you must open the disc in EAC - it doesn’t transfer the names onto an already burned disc, but it will remember its entry in the database by reading the bar code.

If you don’t know what the songs are, and there is no CD text, I don’t think there’s a way to get that information back.

5

An interesting exception to this rule is Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi: Music From the Series. It is a perfectly ordinary audio Cd, but when I put it in my portable CD/MP3 player it showed the titles. Neat. :smiley:

6

I think this is the only program that does this. It does okay. The hard part is that it may suggest three options and you’ll have no idea which one is right.

7
      • There are ways to embed the Artist and title info into a “regular” CD using CD Text or CD-Extra–but then it really isn’t a regular CD anymore. This feature is coming into wider use as more players support it:
        (info link)
        http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq03.html#S3-7
        ~
8

I used Tag&Rename and was very satisfied.

9

This isn’t correct. There’s no barcode to read. CDDB ID codes are basically a hash of the Table of Contents of the disk. They are not necessarily unique, but might as well be for practical purposes.

I’ve used MusicBrainz in the past, and it worked… ok. For one, it’s much better at figuring out songs that were downloaded from P2P networks because it can find the exact hash of the file. For songs you’ve ripped yourself, it uses the track title (no good for you), the length of the song, and some kind of rhythmic analysis to varying degrees of effectiveness. At the time I used it, it was also incredibly slow and often timed out because too many people were accessing it.

10

Yes, there is, that’s why I wrote it. It’s contained in the TOC ring at the inside of the disc. Have a look at commercial CDs. I just checked 10 at random. Each had one visible. Being in the audio business for 30 years has taught me a thing or two.

11

CDDB doesn’t use the barcode though. It uses the song lengths. Proof? If you burn a copy of a CD, it can recognize it as the original.

12

That’s because if you are making a clone of the CD, it will contain the data in the TOC of the original. Including the bar code.

13

Just wanted to back up iamthewalrus and SmackFu. The visible bar code exists, of course, but home CD burners aren’t capable of reading/writing it. Like SmackFu said, it’s all about track length.

From Wikipedia:

14

I think we are describing the same thing in different terminology. The folks I work with at the CD pressing plants call it a bar code. If you look at the disc, the bars resemble those of a bar code, spread out, around the circle. This portion of the disc contains the track times and locations on the disc where the laser will find them, and other data.

If you burn your own CD, and enter the track titles and artist(s), that data will be stored in the TOC. Any CD player with CD Text capability will display them on playback. If you don’t enter the names, your CD will have Track01, Track 02 etc. as I mentioned above, and the information will not be retrievable from CDDB.

15

The information will absolutely be retrievable from CDDB, because it’s based entirely on track start times as shown in the TOC (it doesn’t use CD-Text…see Wikipedia cite). As further, anecdotal, proof, I will tell you I’ve burned albums directly from MP3, and as long as the track times and order matched the album, the CDDB was able to recognize it. (It can even offer up a “best guess” if the times are not exact).

If by bar code you mean, well, the bar code as shown on the left side of this picture, that’s not where the TOC is located. The TOC resides on the same track as the rest of your data (in the lead-in), and is not visibly different from anything else on the disk.

I’m sure those bar codes are valuable for cataloging purposes within the recording industry, but that doesn’t mean the CDDB makes any use of them, nor that our home CD burners are capable of reading/writing them.

16

I was laughing and had to chime in. I’ve been in the TECHNOLOGY business for OVER 30 years… music industry, banking, you name it… my knowledge is not limited to what the music industry does. I also have a clearance with the government and have worked on systems and technologies that consumers have yet to even know about.

That all being said, fish, you’re DEAD WRONG in your statements about how the CDDB collective works (as well as FreeRip) with gathering information to identify a CD’s contents.

The “Barcode” as you put it does not even exist.

Also there are two types of drives and even a lightscribe drive (which has access to burn in areas physically outside of the actual substraite window) cannot read that area you cited earlier.

I see so many people BS with things like this.

There is no ISO standard or IEEE standard including kanji, rebook (more commonly referred to as LPCM), or the ASPI layer itself, which includes the inner ring on a CD for reading or writing. That is a laser etched pressed area that is only capable by a glass master.

This area is called the “pressed matrix.” (Matrix for short)

You can look this up and teach yourself, I didn’t come in to dive super deep on that specific.

I just have to comment when people tout themselves as an authority on a subject by with the first post demonstrate they have absolutely no rudimentary conceptual understanding of the subject matter at all. Anyone who understands even something as simple as physical behavior of a CD and player can look at the lens and motor track to see that it cannot physically move to that area (at least a majority of them)

Older copy protection schemes used to use that area to verify it as original or copy (because no home recorder can get to that place to write, but it COULD be read) once they did away with the SCSI based burners (We’re talking the Yamaha G40 days… remember CADDY LOADS!!! HAHAAH) they decided to use lasersafe/safeloc for a majority of copy protection schemes. These are TOC/block manipulation methods, not physicality methods.

I am surprised BEING AUDIO, that cinevia hasn’t been applied to audio cds… I mean it’s an AUDIO watermark…

I guess they conceded to a loss in that there are way too many CD players out there that aren’t cinevia aware and nobody is about to go replacing them,… if anything audio CDs are on their way out…
So fish, when in a TECHNICAL FORUM try to think twice when saying “I can sound like I know what I’m talking about and nobody here is good enough to see through it as nonsense.”

There’s always going to be a true expert. Me personally I am not an optical storage guru… I am a Virtualization Architect and I focus on SAN array storage mostly. EMC, Netapp. SOMETIMES I get into some LTO tape libraries as solutions but never mageto-optical or CD/DVD because it’s just not a good solution. BluRay was promising with 50GB but it never took off for enterprise as a solution.
Now in YOUR defense Fish, there is KIND of some truth to your guess but not exactly.

If you go to this hardware address:
0x8e
You get the UPC/EAN information so you can consider that a “barcode” but this does not provide the required information and CDDB certainly does not use it.

There are two methods. (hence the 2 databases)

1)What everyone here talked about. Total # of tracks, Total album length. (That alone does it 90% of the time) then it goes into individual track start/stop to determine specifics that have duplicate total volume scores

2)the CDA hash used (for CRC purposes) This is UNIQUE per track and album because due to the standard of cyclic redundancy, you must be able to identify two identical files separately in a single pass. (Now obviously if you were to take 10 identical CDs from the store THEIR hash is the same for track #1. However if you were to generate a new CD its track #1 would have a different hash…

I am pretty sure everyone who’s a beginner reading #2 understands that one completely because that sort of data is commonplace. (Think SID)

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POST RELATED RESPONSE:

I too would love to find an app that can ID my custom mix CDs. I am AMAZED there isn’t something out there that instead of using CDDB or hash or start/stop info it actually “listens” to the track (digitally obviously for speed purposes) and then submits to the SHAZAM database for identification.

In fact that’s what I do now. Play the track, shazam it, write it down, next tract, etc. etc.

Would be great if a program did that for you but rather than use actual playback and microphone to do it, it just rips the middle 15 seconds, submits that waveform to Shazam and gets the ID and adds it… Would be VERY awesome.

17

Huh. Are you actually Kevin Mitnick?

18

You realize this thread is from 2005, when there was no Shazam, right? Also, fishbicycle hasn’t posted here since 2008, so isn’t likely read your response.

19

Moderator Action

Welcome to the SDMB, kevinmitnick.

Please note that the thread you are replying to is over 10 years old, and many of the original thread participants are no longer around to read your comments.

Since this thread is so old and the technology references within it are likely out of date, I am going to close this. If anyone wishes to discuss the topic in a more modern context, please feel free to open a new thread.

Thread closed.