Re: Mastering and Duplication... Please help me get to the bottom of something.

[zachoff]

We're trying to figure something out. We have mastered tracks on a CD. When we play them in the CD player they come through as "Track 1", "Track 2", etc.. When we copy or rip the CD the artist, album, and track names are all "Unknown".

How do we get the artist, album, and track info onto the disc? Isn't this called "authoring"? I've heard this is something generally done in mastering, but the guy mastering our albums says he doesn't have software that will do this. I'm no sure what he's using.

I've also heard that there's a giant internet database that houses this stuff for itunes and similar sites, and we obviously don't have that going right now... I'm told the replication companies generally handle that?

Anyway, bottom line is when we put our CD in a CD player or when someone rips our CD to mp3 we want to artist, album, and track info to come up. How is this done?

[Richard Lindsey]

Before printing your CDs, you should have obtained/determined ISRC codes, and your mastering engineer should if possible have embedded them in the mastered copy used for duplication/replication.

ISRC - International Standard Recording Code

Beyond that, you need to get your CD info into Gracenote, which I think is the mega-database you're thinking of. Here's how you do that:

Gracenote | Gracenote FAQs

Once you upload your info into Gracenote, in theory anyone who then rips the CD with software that uses Gracenote (eg, iTunes) should get all the correct info.

It's a little bit of a pain, but not a big one, and ideally you only have to do it once.

[zachoff]

Got it, thanks. So, looking also at cd text... Does anyone do this anymore? Seems like it'd be cool on players that recognize it.