I aquired an MP3 player this Christmas. It’s a RCA Lyra with 4GB. A hard drive model.
I like it pretty well so far. I only have a cassette player in my car so this is a real joy for travelling.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to know if anyone else has seen this miraculous phenomena.
We have a 4 CD set of old Country music. I am using WMP 10 and I inserted one of the discs in the CD player to rip to MP3. Much to my surprise Media Player showed a list of songs that didn’t exist on the CD!!!
In other words the list generated by the CD was not what is actually on the CD. In fact the songs aren’t even in the collection.
Two of the CDs register fine. The other two are totally out of whack. My guess is somebody mislabeled the whole mess before they burned the CDs.
I have another CD set where Media Player reads tracks that actually belong on one of the other CDs in the set.
Fortunately WMP 10 offers an easy way to modify the tags on any MP3 so I can fix it. I just thought it was odd.
Many programs, WMP included, use a service called CDDB, which is a
database of CDs and their contents. When you put in a CD, WMP
looks at a serial number at the beginning of the CDs data, and asks
CDDB (via the Internet) for the labels for that CD. The problem is, CDDB
relies a human to enter the track labels, usually the first person to try
to lookup that CD (if that person is willing to bother typing in the info).
So, as you say, that person may have screwed up the labels, or the
CD distributor may have released a CD that has the same serial
number, but which contains different tracks (not uncommon with
collections from smaller distributors).
If this really bugs you, you could have a backup ripping program, like Exact Audio Copy, which uses an alternative to CDDB, called freedb,
which might contain the correct information.
Better still, disconnect from the Internet so that you know you are only looking at what’s on your physical CD. Besides providing dodgy info on the contents of CDs, some of these services are actually monitoring who is ripping off CDs.
I’ve also had this happen a couple of times. I suspect it is not all that rare. I have a couple of commercially produced compilations of folk and irish music that, without ever logging onto the internet to fetch the tune database, show the track listings just fine. However, the track listings versus the actual sequence of tracks that play are either out of order or, are mislabeled entirely. I suspect it’s just sloppy work by the maker of the original master.
I actually got to put up into the Apple data base ( can’t remember) one of the Steeleye albums that was released in the last 5 years, so if it doesn’t match one of your albums, you can blame me
That doesn’t make sense. CDDB and freedb are used even if you
are only playing the CD. They have no knowledge of your ripping
activities because you’ve disconnected before that process even
begins… If anyone is keeping track of your ripping, it would be WMP
itself. And it could wait until you are connected again to upload that
info. That’s why I like the open source stuff.
Wait, they go to the trouble to use the CD-Text section, but don’t
bother to check that it’s right? That’s apalling.
How can the record companies tell if you’re just ripping a CD that you own? Freedb and CDDB are just archives of info, and media players (like WMP and Winamp) and ripping programs (like Exact Audio Copy, which I like) are all freeware…
You can shut off the internet access on Winamp, so it doesn’t try to go online and find out what your CD’s contents are. Winamp used to use CDDB which charges a fee to programmers to use its database - hence freedb. The whole thing began in an altruistic sort of manner but CDDB/Gracenote are trying to make a buck at the same time.
I’ve added a few Irish CDs to freedb, Micho Russell’s In Our Own Dear Land and Frank Quinn’s If You are Irish, for instance. Exact Audio Copy works well at submitting stuff. All of this ripped media schtuff is grand! You get to shuffling tracks and you don’t know what the hell will come up next.
I wondered if WMP was going online to find album info. Considering Microsoft’s obsession with getting online for the stupidest things I presumed it was. Therefore I disconnected from the internet but still got the same results. I believe it’s probably because somehow WMP had stored the information. Maybe I’ll try again tonight with no web connection to see if a reboot has solved the problem.
Fortunately WMP allows you to edit all the tags so I can just go in and manually fix it. I’ll have to do that with some of my indie labeled dulcimer CD’s anyway because they just show up as “unknown”.
That’s what I used to think about WMP, but I had a techno-junkie pal of mine set me straight. He set up his rig on some sort of internet bypass so that any information coming into or out of my computer would automatically write to a specific file on his computer’s drive.
WMP 10.0 only sends demographic information on what you like to listen to. If you were making backups for your car or whatnot, it wouldn’t matter anyhow if they were. The written copyright laws dictate that absolutely no copying of copyrighted materials is allowed, but case law and precedent says that if there is no for-profit or trading happening, and you’re backing up your information (i.e. making a cpoy to keep in your car so your originals don’t get ripped off…) it’s all good and cool. Elsewise half the functions of WMP would be illegal, and since we already know the powers that be are spoiling for any rumble they can get at Microsoft, and since case law and precedent will trump what’s written, it’s highly, highly unlikely that, if you are using common sense, anyone will bother you about copying your CDs for personal use.
Can you believe they actually had a course in this bull**** for my degree?
Tyler, I understand what you are saying. Call me paranoid if you like, but I suspect that this info is being monitored for more than just demographics. Whether anyone has acted on it (yet) is a separate issue. The music industry is a long way from giving up on rips.
What are they going to do with that information, though? All they transmit back to their mainframe is album and title track in basic text.
Trust me, there is nothing else leaving your computer.
Are you afraid that they’re going to find out that you like Winger and pull them off the shelf? Maybe they’ll round up all the Captain and Tennille fans and send them to Mars
Ok, i’m just kidding, but honestly, there really is so little information leaving your computer as a result of WMP that it’s literally useless for any other purpose, they don’t even disclose your general location.
The music industry is a long way from giving up on rips.
But they still have to obey the law too, and when the law says there are restrictions on what they can go after you for, they must abide by that law as well as we must. The difference on their side of the copyright issue coin is that they are reaching a point where they will have to choose their battles carefully. They have villified themselves in the eyes of the great majority of the public, and so, are watching their own actions a little more carefully. Going after someone for making personal use copies will be more than a waste of their time and money than they would lose in copyright fraud, it will cost them in legal and civil penalties as well. I can tell you one thing for sure, if they ever tried to come after me for having a backup copy in my car, I’d quintouple their “losses” that year and my dream of “owning” a major record label would come true.
I use mine to listen to books on tape. I’ve made my way through the whole Sherlock Homes collection and a few other books. It’s a great way to stimulate your mind when your hands are full.
Maybe they’ll round up all the Captain and Tennille fans and send them to Mars 
