I ripped some CDs today, and was very surprised to see this in iTunes:
iTunes uses the Gracenote CDDB database for CD lookups, and, for 99.9% of the CDs I’ve ripped, it finds the correct albums. (One notable exception is CDs from the Brilliant Classics label.) It finds this metadata because almost every record label uploads it to Gracenote. (Yes, Brilliant Classics is very lazy.)
The CD I was ripping is Philip Glass’s latest release, The Complete Piano Etudes, on his own label Orange Mountain Music. (Amazon.com, Amazon UK) I’ve ripped other Philip Glass CDs shortly after they were released – this disc is only a few weeks old – and always gotten track info. So this one is surprising.
If you don’t see track info, you can enter it yourself, and then upload it to Gracenote, so others who rip the CD will get your tags when they rip it.
To do this, select the first track on a CD in iTunes, and then press Command-I (or Shift-I on Windows). Fill in the fields that display in this window; at least the song name, artist and album fields; if it’s classical music, also enter the composer. If there are more than one discs, click the Add Field menu and add the disc number field.
When you’ve finished entering the data for one track, press Command-N, or click the next button at the bottom left of the window. Enter the data for other tracks, and then click OK.
Next, click the Options menu near the top-right of the iTunes window and choose Submit CD Track Names. This sends the information to Gracenote. iTunes will confirm that the data has been sent.
