discid and toc files

[Warren Knauer]

Just wondering about these files placed in album folders...  how are they used?  contents? importance?

Asking because I had a "bargain CD" which contained 2 albums on 1 CD from Don Williams, a US country music artist.  This may be the only disc like this I own but it certainly is not the only time I've seen a record company issue or license a 2-for-2 like this...  Or course, the albums didn't need separating but I decided to do that manually across Brennan's NAS access while bored.  I copied the same discid and toc files to both "new" split-out albums, deleting the originally combined album.

Scanned all again and the 2 albums play fine--they do lack the album art but so did the combined album. 

Thanks!

Warren

[Daniel Taylor]

Nice job!  The B2 can be a bear to use for some lesser needed operations.

Since you already have NAS access, it should be a breeze to copy some coverart.jpg files to the appropriate album folders.  I get a lot of art from Amazon, although lately I've seen the Amazon logo layered over some of the artwork.  Discogs is really good for album art, too.

[AJ]

The toc file is a copy of the CD Table of Contents and the discid file contains a copy of the disc id that is used to perform the lookup in the Musicbrainz database, it also contains a copy of the freeDB disc id.  They are left by the CD ripping process, if you did not rip the CD on the Brennan you will not have them and therefore it is safe to delete them if required, however they are very small and can be useful.  I use the discid file for unknown albums to get the freeDB disc id and use it to perform a lookup in a local copy of the freeDB database.  The information in these files refer to the physical CD and in your case where you have split the two albums they are less useful but they will not do any harm.

[Warren Knauer]

Thanks very much both AJ and Daniel -- I have been buried on my Mac where these files were characterized in the Finder as "Unix executable" so I planned to have a look using Notepad++ on my Win10 PC later this evening (here).  When I saw that on the Mac I presumed they were likely just text files, but just to be safe--that curiousity was tabled.