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Music files 101

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SKesselman:


A little late, but I finally decided to drop this idea.
CW, Thanks for taking the time to explain all of this so clearly.

Curt:
It should also be noted that the problems you experienced with lack of informations, not are due to the media player itself, but to the place where the media player gather such informations. Gracenote CDDB has more info on old / classical music, than "the others". RealPlayer 11 and iTunes are to my understanding both using Gracenote. But I don't remember where Windows Media Player will go collecting. Maybe you could try installing RealPlayer or iTunes (!!) and record the same CDs that were causing problems the first time, just to see if there are any differences?

Gracenote Customers

*
* iTunes uses Gracenote’s CD track identification services.[3]
In addition, Gracenote provides its products to a number of other services including

    * Online services including Yahoo! Music Jukebox, AOL Winamp;
    * Home and Automotive products from Alpine, Bose, Panasonic, Phillips, and Sony;
    * Mobile music applications from Samsung[4], Sony Ericsson (TrackID), KDDI (Japan), KTF (Korea), Musicwave (Europe).-Wikipedia
--- End quote ---

In which country are you situated, Sarah? The biggest telephone company in Denmark, YouSee, gives free access to several million tracks, to their customers. Music can be free, it only depends on the circumstances. In this situation the trick for YouSee is to encode the music files with a key which the user can only unlock when connecting to the telephone company's homepage. This way the music is not ours, and not really free, but freely available anyway, when we are online. I am not telling you to upload your new collection, such coding is difficult, but I am merely pointing out that it is too easy to say that it surely must be illegal to upload music.

SKesselman:
Thank you, Curt, I knew it couldn't be so black & white-even my OS (or rather, its media player) offers to 'rip' & to 'burn' & the 'line' between what's legal and what isn't keeps getting more blurry as I read.

I am in the US. I had a look at yousee.dk.
I really like the idea behind what they're doing (I just can't navigate)  ;).

I wiki'd everything from CW's response and ended up at the Gracenote web site fairly quickly, but the whole thing is too tedious (with the exception of yousee.dk).

So, I've decided to just copy the Christmas CD's to my external drive & send my little sister the originals.
I hate CD's (not meant to be handled by humans, unless they're being tossed, that's always fun  :P) & I won't take nearly as good care of them as she will!

Thanks for your reply  :) all the same.

Hirudin:
I'm a disc hater too... I've been doing a lot of ripping lately using dbPoweramp CD Ripper. It's got a feature they're calling "PerfectMeta" which queries 4 different title databases* to get the best information for each track. It also downloads the album art. I haven't actually compared the results with many of the original CD cases but the logic behind PerfectMeta is sound, and that's enough for me...

If you're still thinking about ripping all those CDs, check out the dbPoweramp demo. You should be able to rip them all within the 21 day trial period.

*
MusicBrainz - This is what I've been using to tag all my files... Their database seems to be accurate, but I've ran into a few CDs that were not in the database.
AMG/All Music Guide - from what I've seen this database is very good and very extensive
freedb - this is user created as far as I know, the results from this are usually OK, but typos are prevalent
GD3 - I don't know what this one is, so I don't know how good it is

Music_Guy:
On a side note:

While I'm aware that most classical music composers (Bach, Beethoven etc.) are being dead for quite some time now...longer dead than RIAA regulations, so their music is copyright free.

Now I heard something about still living descendants that can claim rights. Is this true?  
-Shades (August 14, 2008, 05:58 PM)
--- End quote ---

For the dead composer stuff mentioned, I know in Canada (and I think it's similar or the same for the US), copyrights to a piece of music are valid up to 50 years after the death of the last songwriter for each song example; a band of 4 musicians who write together, 3 of them are gone in a plane crash when they are young, but one lives 100 years more than when that song was written, then the copyright is valid for 150 years total from the time it was written.

Even if a writer dies, his rights to his music can be passed on to family members for the duration of the copyright.

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