CDDB Compatible CD Players |
by Gnomie Matt Gruett
CDDB compatible CD players have the ability to display an audio CD's artist, album name and song titles. The "CD" in CDDB stands for compact disc, and the "DB" stands for database. The player queries a database to see if there is a match and then fills in the information. The idea is that there's no point in having everyone type in "U2" and the titles to all 12 songs every time they listen to "Achtung Baby" on their computer. Not that everyone bothers to do this anyway, but the point is that if one person already did it, why shouldn't that person's work be shared with everyone else? After all, computers were created to make things easier and help save time, right? Thus, CDDB was born as a way to have all of this information ready for download off of the Internet. And while it started before the MP3 craze, CDDB has proved to be a boon for MP3s as well.
Audio CDs don't have any type of serial numbering system, so the designers of CDDB had to find another way to uniquely identify a CD. CDDB uses a combination of the subcode information contained on a CD along with the number of tracks and their length to try and uniquely identify it. That way when you insert a CD, you only get the correct information instead of every CD in the database that has 12 tracks on it. However, there are bound to be some duplicates out there. When this happens, CDDB presents you with all of the possible matches and lets you manually select the correct entry.
As the MP3 craze began, a new type of CDDB enabled software began to appear - MP3 rippers and encoders. Since you take the song off a CD that can be queried against the CDDB database when you rip and encode, it makes perfect sense to CDDB enable your ripper and encoder so that it can perform automatic naming of the MP3 files that are created. Many of them allow you to customize the naming format as well.
This turns out to be awfully handy since MP3 players can't use CDDB. The reason is that CDDB works by looking at the entire CD contents and using that information to identify the CD. With an MP3, you've changed the songs from the CD into independent MP3 files and have removed the context that CDDB needs in order to uniquely identify it. Not to worry though since the naming of the files when you rip and encode takes care of this. And further, the MP3 spec allows for the embedding of CDDB-like information right inside of the file itself. This way, the information travels along with the MP3 file and is not lost as soon as someone renames the file.
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