How To Capture Cd Track Listing & Metadata

[PaulyCC]

Hi,

 

I assume that Roxio can help handle capturing metadata to read on computer platforms? So far I've had luck on my CD players but how do I keep the track listing consistent and capture the metadata to be visible on a variety of platforms? I'm using Windows 8 for this. Something that works in the Apple universe as well.

[Brendon]

Hi Pauly,

 

Don't know about the Apple Universe, since Mac programs have their own forums.

 

Are you running NXT 5 under Windows 8? If so, where are you wanting to capture your metadata from?

 

Regards,

Brendon

[theoldarchiver]

If you are referring to audio CDs, iTunes and the macOS Finder get Audio CD metadata from Gracenote online lookup, unless the disc identification is matched locally, i.e. unless there is already metadata on the harddisk from a previous time the Audio CD was identified. This is unrelated to the presence of CD-TEXT on the disc, AFAIK.

[PaulyCC]

Thanks for the responses. I could not find any software for the MAC which, at least in the free versions, could do the metadata authoring I wanted on my Apple. Thus I decided to try Roxio on my PC as it seemed to have a lot of handy features in addition to some I was specifically looking for. So far I seem to be having some success. These tunes I'm trying to put on CD are originals which I've recorded on Logic Pro recording software on the Mac. It seems that the Windows world is a bit less hostile to creating CDs since Apple doesn't really deal in the disc format anymore.

 

I've made some headway by going to Music-Audio and then the sub-headers Create and then Create Music Disc Projects. From there I clicked an MP3/WMA file on my Windows notebook. I found that the data I'd already put in on each file manually adding it in windows. Cool! So far I've made a disc which correctly reads the CD info and plays the songs in the correct I made in the correct order when using a computer but some weird files show up in Apple. The problem I had burning to CD from Windows was that the computer was likely to play the songs in alphabetical order. And some misconfigurations on some people's systems I can do nothing about. I couldn't count on the track order being correct elsewhere. It read in alphabetical order when my PC ripped it off the CD and into a file folder. On the same computer it's wrong!

 

And then on a CD player it might not always show the song information. Thus I needed an authoring program like Roxio.

 

To theoldarchiver, yeah, I saw that I could get Gracenote to turn on at some point in the editing process. I don't recall at the moment where I had a dialog box that allowed me to tag a song and Gracenote started up. It changed the information on one of my songs to something in the Disney catalog. I clicked back to the original take and my data was back. But I do want to look into that. That's cool if Gracenote uses it. Problem solved on computers and phones? I know I can invoke Gracenote so I hope that's accessible for me to create a listing. That would be sweet.

 

I also should mention that I made a couple changes inside of Project Settings. I made sure all file naming boxes were checked Rename Tracks To Ensure Playback Order. When plugged into my Mac and found using the Finder, it showed a bunch of extra files as well. I've now figured out how they were created. I may need to uncheck some of the file names as I was seeing them on the CD when pulling it into iTunes. These include a bunch of empty 'untitled' file folders and other headings. Like Content.ASX, Content.M3U, Content.WPL etc. They produce only an identifying thumbnail when adding them to iTunes. I've seen .asx. Do I keep that? I need to research what to keep. Nonetheless it plays OK and went into iTunes so I'm pretty happy. Now I'll try a fresh project and see if I can remove the unnecessary files from reading it on Apple devices once I figure out tagging and about those additional formats.

 

Also inside Project Settings I upgraded the MP3 quality default to good quality. It was set to low quality by default. These are fresh high quality 320 kbps MP3s since I'm the source and they are directly downloaded from the recording session. Never additionally compressed. If it filled nearly the entire disc I might have needed to go with lower quality to get it all on the disc.