- 8 About Music and Video Formats
- 9 Import a Music CD into iTunes
- 10 Get CD Track Names Manually
- 11 Add a Music or Video File to Your iTunes Library
- 12 Import Your Existing Digital Music Collection into iTunes
- 13 Add Album Art to Songs
- 14 Submit CD Track Names to the Gracenote Database
- 15 Import a CD with Joined Tracks
- 16 Extract a Secret Track into the iTunes Library
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
14 Submit CD Track Names to the Gracenote Database
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Import a Music CD into iTunes
Examine and Modify Song Information Tags
The reason Apple uses the Gracenote database to provide track names for inserted CDs is that it’s the largest public database of track names available. It’s the largest because it gets information from the millions of people using software like iTunes every day. Apple could have chosen to provide its own internal music database, with professionally entered information—as Microsoft did in the past for its own CD-playing software—but the inevitable result would have been that its information would have been much more limited. Apple chose to go with Gracenote’s much greater coverage of all the thousands, if not millions, of CD albums available in the world, because the risk of occasional erroneous information was a small price to pay for the much vaster field of information that is available.
As an iTunes user importing the music from your CD collection for the first time, you can do your part to make sure that the Gracenote database has the most accurate information possible. If you notice errors in the track name data it provides, simply make the necessary corrections and submit the changes back to Gracenote before you import each CD.
To submit CD track information, you have to start with a physical commercial CD, not just a collection of tracks in your Library.
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Insert an Audio CD
Select an audio CD that you want to add to your iTunes Library. Insert it into the computer’s CD drive and close the drive door. Wait for iTunes to populate the CD’s track listing; if you don’t have an Internet connection, the tracks are given generic names, such as Track 01, Track 02, and so on.
Make Necessary Edits to Track Names
Using the info window or the displayed fields in the song listing pane, enter the proper names for the tracks on the CD. The best approach is to select all the songs on the disc, choose File, Get Info (or right-click the song and choose Get Info from the context menu), and make all the changes at once to as many fields as possible. Make sure that the CD’s title is correct; if it’s part of a multiple-disc set, fill in the Disc Number fields rather than putting an identifier such as [1/3] in the title. If you can, fill in the Composer, Genre, and Year fields, too. (Year should reflect the original release date of the album so that the music on the disc can be accurately pegged to a certain era in musical history.) Click OK when you’re done; all the fields are updated to reflect your changes.
Connect to the Internet
If you’re not connected to the Internet already, connect now. Dial up your modem or connect to the wireless or wired network, depending on your circumstances.
Submit CD Track Names
Choose Advanced, Submit CD Track Names. iTunes connects to the Gracenote site, checks the available categories, and submits your information. The information submitted uses the CD’s track lengths as a key to find the correct database entry; it uses your edited track names as the information to submit. If an entry for your CD is already in the database, your new information will supersede it.
That’s all there is to it. The Gracenote staff checks your submission for accuracy and adds it to the database usually within a day or two. Don’t expect feedback or a thank-you from Gracenote—but from now on, anyone trying to import the same CD whose information you just submitted will get your more accurate information instead of what was available before.