how the
Ok, how the h-e-double hockey stick did it do that?
So, I've been furiously feeding music from my CD collection into iTunes lately, the better to have a whole buncha stuff to listen to at work. Now, when you stick a CD into the computer, iTunes goes and queries an online CD database to get track names, artist, times, etc. This works great with most commercial CDs, but not well with small releases and not at all, or so I thought, with stuff you burn yourself from your vinyl or tape collections. Guess I thought wrong, though.
I have two copies of Midnight Oil's brilliant Diesel and Dust album on CD. The first is a commercial disc bought in the usual manner, to replace the vinyl that everyone told me was obsolete. The other was made after Bad Things (tm) happened to said commercial disc at a party. The CD started skipping like mad, and reasoning that I wasn't going to buy the album three times I just recorded my LP copy of the album into the computer and burned a disc. Now keep in mind the times on the tracks are likely a little off from the CD, as my turntable is by no means calibrated to any standard, and I set the track boundaries kind of arbitrarily in some cases. Plus, there's no way the waves look like the CD version; the glorious crackles and pops of vinyl, plus the format's different EQ curve, guarantee that.
So imagine my surprise when I put this disc in my PowerBook, ready and willing to type in all the damn song titles myself, only to have the CDDB return the information on its own.
Wow! I suppose it's all some fairly straightforward bit of AI, where it looks for a best fit based on number and length of tracks, but I'm impressed nonetheless.
So, I've been furiously feeding music from my CD collection into iTunes lately, the better to have a whole buncha stuff to listen to at work. Now, when you stick a CD into the computer, iTunes goes and queries an online CD database to get track names, artist, times, etc. This works great with most commercial CDs, but not well with small releases and not at all, or so I thought, with stuff you burn yourself from your vinyl or tape collections. Guess I thought wrong, though.
I have two copies of Midnight Oil's brilliant Diesel and Dust album on CD. The first is a commercial disc bought in the usual manner, to replace the vinyl that everyone told me was obsolete. The other was made after Bad Things (tm) happened to said commercial disc at a party. The CD started skipping like mad, and reasoning that I wasn't going to buy the album three times I just recorded my LP copy of the album into the computer and burned a disc. Now keep in mind the times on the tracks are likely a little off from the CD, as my turntable is by no means calibrated to any standard, and I set the track boundaries kind of arbitrarily in some cases. Plus, there's no way the waves look like the CD version; the glorious crackles and pops of vinyl, plus the format's different EQ curve, guarantee that.
So imagine my surprise when I put this disc in my PowerBook, ready and willing to type in all the damn song titles myself, only to have the CDDB return the information on its own.
Wow! I suppose it's all some fairly straightforward bit of AI, where it looks for a best fit based on number and length of tracks, but I'm impressed nonetheless.
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