Gracenote getting better with classical

Posted by Daniel Stout on Fri 19 Jan 2007 at 6:54 AM

When we open a CD in iTunes, iTunes will automatically check an online database for the song and artist information. This database of metadata makes our lives easier by removing the need for a lot of data entry when we’re ripping CDs. Apple’s iTunes uses a service called Gracenote. Gracenote got their metadata database start by buying out CDDB, which used to be a freely available place to get CD track information. Developers were free to use the CDDB API to make their music applications automatically download metadata. Now that information is no longer freely available. Gracenote charges for that information, although it seems to be still largely compiled from user submissions.

Because Gracenote is compiled from user submissions, it contains a lot of errors and mistakes. Of ten we’ll put in a CD only to find that Gracenote has multiple entries for the same CD, and we’re supposed to guess, which one is more accurate. For a commercial service, the quality of the data is uniformly low, in my opinion.

One particular area that Gracenote really fell down is in classical music. We ripped most of my classical CDs into iTunes a couple of years ago, and Gracenote was atrocious. The metadata varied wildly from CD to CD. On some CDs the composer was listed as the artist, on others the performer was. In far too many cases, there was track information in the artist field or some other mix-up of the columns. It was a total mess.

The quality of Gracenote’s classical CD data was horrific. We were ripping some classical CDs last night though, and keen observation indicates that the quality of Gracenote has improved substantially in the classical area. Gone was data in the wrong field. It wasn’t always consistent about whether composer or performer appeared in the artist field, but overall, it was much, much better. CDs such as Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique that had Berlioz’s name nowhere in the metadata now had corrected that error. There were still a number of CDs that had collisions with multiple sets of metadata for the same CD.

Overall, Gracenote is improving. We wish that iTunes offered the option of where to download data from — because we’d rather use the free and open FreeDB.

Tags: apple · cddb · freedb · gracenote · itunes

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