On Thu, 2005-05-26 at 16:47 -0400, ron thigpen wrote: > Pat Farrell wrote: > > The "standard" way most software on the 'net identifies a CD is > > using the CDDB hash, which is not unique, neither is any rational > > combination of artist/album names. > > this is just a hash of the CD title track data isn't it? it might not > do the trick all by itself, but if it exists it would be a very strong > hint. hash/ID collisions should be reasonably rare. but not everyone's > tracks will have this tag.
It is not about the name or title. And it is not associated with the specific track/song It is a hash calculated from the number of tracks and the length of each track. Since lots of pop/rock/country CDs have around 10 songs and the songs are about 3 minutes long each, there are a lot of collisions in those types of songs. In other areas, like Classical Symphonies, there are usually only 6 movements per Album, and there is a fair amount of variance, so you don't see that many conflicts. I don't know what the actual statistics are, but when you use any of the rippers that talk to CDDB (or freedb) to get track info, you see it 'frequently' pop up a selection dialog box to let the user resolve the collisions. Some metadata taggers store the value in the MP3/ogg/flac files, others seem to not bother. It is really an "album" characteristic, not a song/track characteristic. An additional problem is that the cddb data (and the freedb data) is not very clean. For many albums that I've prepared, the dialog box from CDex will show three "names" that are clearly the same album to a person, but that have differing genres, or punctuation of the names (all the stuff that started this thread). Still, it is a start, and with a little careful mangling, you could probably automate 99% of the cases. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
