Gracenote; ripping CDs on Windows
Jan/082
I rip my CDs on Windows . . . for my own personal use, of course. I used to use MusicMatch because I loved the “all you can eat” streaming subscription. But since MusicMatch got absorbed by Yahoo Music, it hasn’t been an option (Yahoo Music’s selection isn’t as good, and I don’t think the player is tied to AllMusic.com).
So anyway . . . A huge frustration with MusicMatch was that its CDDB sucked big time. Anything new or even slightly obscure would not be found, and I’d have to type in the songs myself. Plus, the MusicMatch ripper would not keep the per-track artist, which was deadly for anthologies.
In looking around for an alternative, I noticed that WinAmp pro throws in a subscription to Gracenote (probably the best CDDB out there – they were the orginators), and the Pro version of WinAmp is only about $20.
Wow, what a change. It has matched much more stuff, and WinAmp respects the per-track artists: So, particularly for quasi-historical anthologies (such as Mojo’s) I’m not always going back to the CD case to see what they heck I’m listening to.
Meanwhile, Mighty Baby’s track “Egyptian Tomb” (1969): Good grief, why didn’t this get wider circulation!?
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3:35 am on January 2nd, 2008
On Windows, for ripping CDs, I very much like Exact Audio Copy (EAC). You can configure various CD DBs; the default is freedb. Gracenote offends me because they got all of their initial data by user entry, then started charging for it.
You can include or omit any track field names in the filenames. I usually dump everything that I want in the filename, then have an ID3 editor (I use ID3-TagIt) extract those from the filename and drop it into the ID3 metadata.
You have to configure the encoding software separately, which EAC will spawn for each track. I use LAME and am happy with it.
12:39 pm on January 2nd, 2008
I know about the history of gracenote . . . but the quality of the existing database is so good!