Album and track names when ripping

[George Wych]

Can anyone advise why I never get album or track names from the B2 when I am ripping a CD? I have the latest software and I am hard wired to my LAN so the internet is definitely connected. I am not buying particularly unknown music - for example last week it was a Stereophonics album and today a Rex Orange Country album. It’s been the same for everything I have recently bought and it’s such a pain to have to rip, then laboriously name the album and each track. Now I don’t normally even try to rip new music ….. and am starting to revert to the dreaded iTunes, which always finds the album and loads it with all the names and artwork. I really don’t want to have to load all my albums (2,000+) into iTunes and drop the B2. 

Am I doing something wrong? Or can the B2 be modified to use more sources of album info?

Many thanks

[Jeff. M.]

Hi, have you tried playing an internet radio station to make sure you are definetly connected to internet? Do you use the web ui or app on phone or tablet? I found that once the cd was inserted, wait a few seconds for it to be read, and then a list comes up with what should be your album first on that list, you can check there on the track listing, and then rip the CD. Sorry if I am teling you how to suck eggs!

[Ray Dion]

Looking at the Brennan page  How To Rip a CD – thebrennan, you have a couple of things perhaps.

While not likely based on your description if you don't have an internet connection you could download and install the Freedb database. It is dated but should find some of your CDs.

The second option is to see if you just hit a few CDs that MusicBrainz does not have. In my collection of about 900 CDs I would guess on the order of a couple of dozen did not have MusicBrainz entries, mostly compilations. I actually hit a couple of them right off when I started and was worried. After that I had pretty good luck.

You can verify the Musicbrainz database by using the free application Musicbrainz Picard on your desktop. My desktop is Windows so that is what I am familiar with. You load a CD into the CD drive of you computer and then click on the button "Load CD" in Musicbrainz. It will then do a search of the online database for you. If you get the same answer of no track data available then perhaps your B2 is working fine. If the CDs comeback with proper data then a closer look is in order.

 You might review the hints on the Brennan CD ripping page. If you intend to do 2000 CDs, an external drive would be a worthy investment. I did this and it worked like a champ. I only used the internal CD drive a couple of times to make sure it worked.

[Les Stanley]

I've been having this issue for a while and like the OP the albums are nothing obscure. The latest two were Dylan's Springtime in New York and Joni Mitchells Archives Volume 2. Manually typing in all the track info would have taken ages so I simply used an old PC which still has a CD drive and copied them using Windows Media Player and then uploading them to the B2. This always seems to find even the most obscure albums and track listings so I don't know why the B2 can't.

On a related note what happened to the feature that used to let you search for track listings after you'd uploaded something? That was quite useful.

[osro...@yahoo.com]

Another suggestion to avoid typing everything would be go to a wedsight like discogs.com and just copy and paste all your song & album information from there.  Hope that this helps.

Rocky

[George Wych]

Thanks for the tip - I might have to use this workaround. It’s a shame, because the CD ripping was a good thing about the B2. If we’re not using that feature then it’s lost a lot of its attraction to me. 

[George Wych]

Thanks for this. I’ll use it for the albums I’ve already loaded with no track names.

[George Wych]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I'm definitely connected to the internet. Maybe I am just unlucky with my taste in music and none of my recent purchases are popular enough to be on the CD Lookup, but it worked fine in the past.

[PMB]

Hi George,

You can search the MusicBrainz database - www.musicbrainz.org - for those albums.

Sometimes you'll find they are listed but they do not have the 'discID' (which I believe is required).

Paul

Brennan Support.

[George Wych]

Hi Paul

Thanks for replying. I'm sorry if this is a basic question but I looked on MusicBrainz and the most recent ambum I tried is there (it's "Who Cares?" by Rex Orange County) but I can't see a discID - is this something I can edit myself on MusicBrainz and then the B2 will recognise it? Or are you saying that there's nothing I can do about this - because the MusicBrainz database does not have all the details for this album? 

If I use an app on my PC called dbPowerAmp CD Ripper to load the album then it gets all the album and track info perfectly. Is it an option to get the B2 to use whatever method this dbPowerAmp software uses? Otherwise for me there's no point having a CD drive on the B2 - I'm not going to use it if it can't get the album and track names. And that was what was so brilliant about the B2 in the past - I just bought more CDs from time to time and loaded them into the B2. Now I have to go through the faff of loading them first onto my PC and then uploading to the B2. 

I love the B2 - really want to get some soultion to this album and track names lookup.

Thanks v much

George

[JFBUK]

Hi George,

one thing to remember about the MusicBrainz database is that its content is predominantly uploaded by public users so when you have a CD that has only recently gone on sale

or has a low ownership then your chances of the information being in the database and the completeness of that information are greatly reduced.

This is going to be true of every public database.

The information about a particular CD includes the DiscID which often gets added when a given CD is ripped by particular software that can upload the information to the database.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/How_to_Add_Disc_IDs

The design of the B2 is such that it can be used as a "one box" solution (which suits many) but also has the ability to work with more sophisticated tools.

That means that the B2 ripping software is relatively simple to use and is not currently user configurable other than the CD title selection when there are multiple matches.

dBpoweramp is much more functional and configurable ripper that has lots of bells and whistles including the ability to search multiple sources for CD information.

Even it can be found out though and I have on several occasions had to use its manual search to get info from Discogs.

I always rip on my PC because it gives more control of the rip, particularly naming, and automatically gives me a backup copy of what I upload to my B2.

John

[PMB]

Hi George,

I know Martin was looking into other databases but do not know the outcome. I'll check.

Hi John,

Thanks for the link to 'Disc IDs'.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[AJ]

Musicbrainz supports a fuzzy search lookup which enables it to find an album even if the database entry does not contain a discid.

I have attached an example in python that implements this both the normal and fuzzy search lookup. 

Andrew.

[Gordon Walters]

Discovering dbpoweramp was a revelation.  As a new user my B2 was able to successfully rip 776 CDs, but left 53 to be manually labelled (93.6% success rate).  Using dbp is saving me from the manual task and once complete I'll upload the FLAC files with artwork to my B2.

When setting up my B2, I noticed that having a solid internet connection was critical for CDDB lookups. For aesthetics I replaced the antenna dongle with a more compact one and the CDDB process became unacceptably protracted.

Brennan should consider integrating the dpb software of offering it as an option. 

[PMB]

Hi All,

I understand Martin has been talking to Andrew Sims about implementing his suggestion of using a 'fuzzy search lookup' which should find more CD titles.

Paul

Brennan Support.