Why does my ripped CD have messed up track names? And why is one track missing?

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Reliability of online CD metadata (MusicBrainz, CDDB, Discogs)

  • Many report frequent mis-tags, especially for Japanese, East Asian, obscure, or rare CDs; albums often matched to entirely different releases.
  • False positives are seen as worse than no data: once you know it can be wrong, you must scrutinize everything, negating any time savings.
  • Some prefer typing everything manually or transcribing from back covers; others still use MusicBrainz but treat it as volunteer archival work, not a time saver.
  • MusicBrainz’s edit workflow (especially 7‑day waits for non‑auto edits) is a common frustration, though some note that only major edits wait and voting/IRC/Discord can speed things up.
  • Acoustic fingerprint / “Scan” features in taggers are widely viewed as the most error-prone; CD TOC lookups plus manual confirmation are preferred.

MusicBrainz, tools, and workflows

  • Despite flaws, many praise MusicBrainz as a powerful, Unicode-capable, open catalog used by many downstream services (Plex, etc.).
  • Picard is considered excellent but initially unintuitive; recommended usage is manual clustering and lookup, avoiding fully automatic scan.
  • Tools like Harmony and userscripts make importing Bandcamp and other digital releases into MusicBrainz much faster.
  • Some projects build new taggers around MusicBrainz, often using TagLib via WASM for robust tag handling.

On-disc metadata and CD-Text

  • Several clarify that standard audio CDs can contain limited metadata (artist, album, track titles, ISRC) via CD-Text/subchannels, contrary to the belief that there is “none.”
  • CD-Text was never widely adopted; licensing/patent issues (not just apathy) are blamed. Many car stereos instead shipped with built‑in Gracenote/CDDB.
  • There’s technical discussion about CD “frames” and sectors, correcting the article’s terminology.

Artistic edge cases vs databases

  • Examples: tracks combined on disc but listed separately, pregap/hidden tracks, graphic-only titles (e.g., icons), single-track multi-song albums, ambiguous disc ordering.
  • Some argue better schemas (parent/child tracks, graphic titles with textual alternates) can handle this; others note some artistic choices are deliberately un-representable.
  • These edge cases frequently confuse databases and auto-taggers, as seen in the missing/combined track in the article.

Ripping hardware and software

  • Recommendations include Pioneer external drives (before their exit from the market), Apple SuperDrive with caveats, and internal drives in quality USB enclosures (often LG/Plextor).
  • Popular software stacks: Exact Audio Copy, XLD, k3b, beets, Picard, AudioRanger, redumper, MakeMKV/LibreDrive; workflows often end in FLAC archival plus MP3/AAC for playback.

Wider ecosystem: streaming, rarity, and genres

  • Physical collections remain important: many note substantial amounts of music (older jazz/blues, local 80s bands, Japanese games/rock) missing or defective on streaming.
  • Genre tagging is widely acknowledged as unsolved: labels conflict, one‑genre fields are limiting, and many users settle on personal, internally consistent genre schemes.