Tagalicious is great, but Gracenote is hit-and-miss though.
So, the last few weeks, in my spare time between installing a new WiFi system and reading up on various programming techniques and best practices, I have been re-ripping all my hundreds CDs into lossless because I finally have the space on my laptop. I am not sure how many CDs and LPs I have, but I would estimate between 600 and 800 CDs alone. This means that the upper limit of my CD collection would be 560GB uncompressed (assuming 800 CDs completely filled with 700MB of music each). I think the actual number will only be around 200GB though after accounting for compression which usually squeeze things into a third of the space, if you add in about ~60GB worth of Vinyl digitized. But I am not going to write about the numbers, since those are just enjoyable for statisticians and math geniuses and algorithmic fun. I might post the final stats for fun, and do something with the data.
No, instead I want to talk about the meta data my computer has been pulling down from Gracenote’s CDDB. Initially, when CDDB came to life I had to submit the CD names and track info to it more often than now. But I took the time, knowing it would help someone else out later. But as time went on more people used the service and less cared about the quality of submissions. So, I noticed I had to correct more errors.
If one is only ripping one or two CDs at a time, corrections are fast and simple. But when one is literally ripping hundreds of CDs these small errors add up to a lot of time and frustration—especially when I noticed the old tags on my MP3s and the AAC files were conflicting with CDDB’s tags, and my original tags were more accurate than the new tags CDDB suggested. So, I have continually had to correct quite a few things in order to have iTunes smoothly replace the lossy files while keeping the good metadata, including my star ratings and hard to find album covers. So, I now present to you my list of grievances with CDDB and people who submit info to it.