Tagging CDs

When the CD hit the market in the 80’s it was considered a high tech media.

But the information about the content was provided in the same way as with vinyl, on paper. There is no information about the content on the CD itself.

In 1996 CDtext was introduced, allowing for storage of additional information (e.g. album name, song name, and artist). Support is common but not universal and of course you won't find it on pre-1996 CDs.

A clever guy found out that the combination of the number of tracks and the duration of each track almost uniquely identifies a CD, kind of DNA. This makes it possible to lookup information about a CD in an internet database like FreeDB.

 

Sometimes the lookup fails:

• Nobody entered information about this CD
• If you have a copy of a CD, it might be just being a fraction longer or shorter than the original.
• The combination of tracks and duration is not unique

In general  these databases have no problems handling CDs with pop music.
In case of classical music don't be surprised to get information like:

 

 

Now Beethoven had a good reputation as a piano player but recordings by him as an artist are a bit rare.

The problem is that FreeDB is a bit of a mess. Don't be surprised if you get

Sonate für Klavier und Violine F-dur Opus 24 [Frühling]
Sonata No. 5 "Frühlings - Sonate"
The Violin Sonata No. 5 in F major “Spring”, Opus 24

 

So you're in for some editing.

AMG and FreeDB

In the past I used Windows Media Player because it uses AMG (All Music Guide) as one of its sources.

 

The artist and the composer are filled in correctly, the conductor is there and so is the cover art. The movements are labeled in a consistent way.

dBpoweramp

dBpoweramp extract information from AMG, SonataDB, Music Brains and FreeDB.

You can inspect the result and choose the one you prefer or combine the results of different databases before you start to rip. You can also edit entries manually.

This is by far the best solution I have found up to now..

The bad news, it only does this at rip time.

You can’t feed your library to dBpoweramp and have it tagged anew.

MusiCHI

The best tagger for classical known to me.

It has GD3, Amazon and FreeDB as internet databases.
It also has its own very extensive database of composers, performers and compositions
Bit more about MusiCHI