GETTING CD INFO

[Peke]

Hi,
If you add CD to MM librray and then fetch CD Info does it gets lost on RIP start?

[AnotherJohn]

May not be sure how to do that. At the very least I find this program not to be very intuitive. Things are not very straight forward. The only way I can seem to get things into the library is to rip the CD. Once they are there I cant seem to do much with the info in the library. I finally had to delete and reload the entire program to get rid of previous library. To update the problem, it seems that I got unlucky and the first two CDs I tried came up as unknown. Since then I have gotten about 10 that the info came right up by just putting the CD in the CD drive and those rip fine. The other two still come up unknown and nothing I have been able to try has been able to get them to rip with the correct info. They show up in the library as unknown artist, unknown album, etc. I am sure I will come up with more of these as I go so would be nice to figure out a fix. In the meantime, I am glad it is not every CD. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

[Lowlander]

If they come up as unknown you'll need to manually add the relevant data before Ripping the files.

They may be too new, a different pressing, self-burned (non-commercial) or just not in the online database. So far I've been really successful with MediaMonkey 5 and MusicBrainz lookup, it has found more than Freedb used to.

[AnotherJohn]

Well the CDs are quite old, they are the MFSL gold CDs so maybe thats it? Followup questions, how do you enter the info before you rip? I know I tried that by filling in a dialog box I could bring up from the CD drive tree but when I ripped it ended up in the library file as unknown so I did something wrong. Also, I have purchased 4 Gold. Does Gold transfer to 5? Or would I be back to a free edition? Thanks for responding again. I really am having trouble with the way MM is laid out.

[Lowlander]

Select the CD drive in the Media Tree and then Edit the Files on the disc in the Filelisting. You can edit Properties of multiple files to enter shared metadata like Album, Date, Album Artist, ect. and then edit individual files to edit things like Title.

[AnotherJohn]

Ok, MM is really giving me fits. Why is it if I have two albums by the same artist the second album wants to override the first one? Getting weird tree results where it lists the artist, then a sub folder called All, then a sub folder "Artist" with a sub folder of "All" and both "All" folders have the same info. Maybe I need something more straight forward because in three days I have gotten nothing accomplished. If I scrap this 4 version and go with 5 do you all think I will have better luck? Can my Gold status be switched from 4 to 5?

[Lowlander]

Then you may have changed how you have the CDs saved to your PC.

If you're using a Mask like C:\Music\<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Track#>. <Artist> - <Title> that shouldn't be a problem unless the Artist and Album are the same.

If you get multiple nested Artist folders on your PC you may have multiple \<Artist>\ and/or \<Album Artist>\ in the Mask.

More on Masks: https://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index. ... ormats/4.0

[AnotherJohn]

Just to let others know. I finally just found a separate program to do the ripping of the CDs. I guess it makes sense that a program that only does ripping will be better at it than a Playback program (at least for me). I will use MM to organize and playback once the ripping is done. Thanks to all who responded.

[GTOJack]

Why can't I use another (or a few) cd info databases? I only have the option to use freedb, which can be spotty (and yes, these are commercial releases that iTunes has no problem identifying).

When I go to options to switch to musicbrainz, freedb is still used.

What would be optimal would be to have a string where there are additional search options... e.g. if freedb can't find info, try musicbrainz, if that doesn't get results, then try gracenote, if that fails enter manually.

[Peke]

Why can't I use another (or a few) cd info databases? I only have the option to use freedb, which can be spotty (and yes, these are commercial releases that iTunes has no problem identifying).

What would be optimal would be to have a string where there are additional search options... e.g. if freedb can't find info, try musicbrainz, if that doesn't get results, then try gracenote, if that fails enter manually.

1) iTunes uses commercial CD lookup not available to public

2) Gracenote is not free and last time we checked if app uses Gracenote then it can't use other CD search providers

[yarguy]

Why can't I use another (or a few) cd info databases? I only have the option to use freedb, which can be spotty (and yes, these are commercial releases that iTunes has no problem identifying).

W

dbpoweramp offers a choice of metadata from various providers for each cd (assuming the provider actually has metadata for that album - not always the case). But do keep in mind that not every entry in the free databases is correct.