How does it know album info?

What exactly is the computer/online database looking at when it's searching for album info? It's apparent that it's not just encoded on the CD because you wouldn't need to be online to get the info. Is it comparing, say, wave patterns?

Just curious.

msi.

 

I guess the CD has some kind of info about what CD it is, then the program looks it up in a database online to get the rest of the info..

 

See the Add or Edit Media Information Web page in the Windows Media Player How-to Center to learn common reasons why your files might not have correct media information, and what you can do to fix them.

When you click More Info in the Library, the currently selected online store (such as MSN Music or Napster) provides the media information. If that store doesn't have information about an album, switch to a different online store by doing the following:

• On the View menu, click Online Stores, and then click another store.
  
  The new online store's Web page appears in the Player. To see the updated media information, click Library.

 

MP3's are embedded with ID3 tags, which contain information for the Artist, Title, Album, Year, Genre and album art, among other things. This allows programs like Windows Media Player and MusicMatch to automatically sort your music into specific categories making it "easier" to find your music; I generally clear out my ID3 tag info, though, because 99% of the time it's not accurate.

 

Ummm... LSD? That depends on if the person who ripped it from the album entered it. and what type media it was ripped from. Example: Rip a factory CD to mp3 using Music Match, it first tries to lookup the info on one of the CDDB sites. (For those who don't know, CDDB stands for CD DataBase. It's looking for artist, album and song title in a specific order of song title to compare to the Album.) If it can't find an internet connection, the user has the option of entering it.
Most are editable anyway.

 

length of songs by track number, length of album in total

.wav don't have id3, right?

 

NOT that I'm aware of!

 

I know that it wasn't requested, but if anyone is looking for a very good tag editor check out a program called Tag&Rename. It's shareware, but if anyone needs a crack just PM me and request it.

 

The original poster is correct; there is indeed an online database for looking up CD track names. Redbook audio CDs do not have artist/track information encoded on them. The name of the database is GraceNote (www.gracenote.com), formerly CDDB. If you're looking for a site to look up music information, however, you may be happier with www.allmusic.com.

 

I don't think anyone's understood the question yet. Yes, we know there's a look-up going on, and yes, we know there's an on-line database. The question is, what data from the CD is cross-referenced against the database in order to correctly identify it?

 

There's midgets inside your computer with an extensive knowledge of music and pea soup