Gracenote Help! It's a mystery

[billwarner]

Seeking help with a deadline...

I have a band that I produce that has a film & TV guy interested in pitching their music to his music supervisors. He is insistent that the titles on the 2 separate discs we provided (one with only vocal mixes, the other with instrumental mixes) show up in iTunes (via Gracenote, of course).

The problem is that when the discs are loaded and iTunes does it's title search, both discs are identified as the instrumental disc even though the vocal disc has different audio files files on it, and is titled differently on the ID3 tags of each track.

I think part of the problem may be that the titles, song sequence, and artist are all the same. I tried to differentiate by naming each of the instrumental tracks - instrumental after it but perhaps it takes even something more profound.

Gracenote was unresponsive to a support email sent over a week ago.

If anyone can offer any help it would be much appreciated.


Thx!!!

[Boschen]

Gracenote's database counts the number of tracks, the spacing, and the length of songs in order to determine the disc's name. I don't think titles effect the database results. So your two discs will look identical to gracenote.

What you have to do is add or subtract a few frames of space anywhere on the disc, so it looks different to gracenote.

You're not the only one to run into this...

I'm basically paraphrasing Katz's 'Mastering Audio', p. 36.

[billwarner]

Thanks for the reply
As I said, the only similarity between the two discs are the artist and the song titles.
I can't imagine that vocal mixes of 8 songs on one CD, and instrumtal mixes of the same 8 songs oln a second CD could be very close down to the frames. Would just 2 frames do it?
I don't know...

[billwarner]

Also, the film & TV guy requested that the the two different discs have the songs in the same order. He claims that that keeps things more organized with the music supervisors as they go between vocal and instrumental versions of the same song. So far, Gracenote can't tell them (the CDs) apart, however.

[Boschen]

According to B.K., only a few frames of difference in spacing between tracks will make the CDs unique to gracenote. Content will have no effect, as gracenote doesn't look at that.

If the vocal and instrumental tracks are the same length, and the spacing between the tracks is the same, and the track count is the same, the discs are the same to gracenote. Not sure why an instrumental mix would be different in length from a vocal mix, unless you changed the head or tail.

Try inserting a different spacing between two of the songs on one disc, and see if it makes a difference to gracenote. I haven't tried this but BK says it will work.

[billwarner]

I will try your suggestion and see what happens in 3 days when it registers in Gracenote. Gracenites ability to
discern between similar tracks must be pretty wide with the 2 different version s being printed out of the box, there is no way they are the same length down to a few frames. Still lioking for some more complete info regarding this scenario.

Thx

[Lagerfeldt]

Use ISRC. That way you don't have to change anything apart from the code.

I get immediate response and nice service from Gracenote support, so try again.

[billwarner]

Originally Posted by Lagerfeldt

Use ISRC. That way you don't have to change anything apart from the code.

I get immediate response and nice service from Gracenote support, so try again.

Both CDs are embedded with unique ISRC codes. And CD-text fwiw. If you are saying that Gracenote uses ISRC, that is the first time I had heard that. Just curious, are you registered with Gracenote? Perhaps that is why you got a quick response.

[sat159p1]

I mastered ana album which I sent to Gracenote DB and then made some modifications (spaces between tracks), and these two CDs inserted to mac, iTunes show that this is the same CD.

So this is NOT about different spacing..

[Lagerfeldt]

Originally Posted by billwarner

Both CDs are embedded with unique ISRC codes. And CD-text fwiw. If you are saying that Gracenote uses ISRC, that is the first time I had heard that. Just curious, are you registered with Gracenote? Perhaps that is why you got a quick response.

No, you're right it doesn't, I was incorrect.

I'm not registered with Gracenote, but I do communicate with their support once in a while. I've PM'ed you a direct email to the support supervisor, maybe you'll have more luck with that one.

Merry Xmas

[billwarner]

Thank you. I'll post my findings. There seems to be a dearth of info regarding this problem.

[Boschen]

Originally Posted by sat159p1

I mastered ana album which I sent to Gracenote DB and then made some modifications (spaces between tracks), and these two CDs inserted to mac, iTunes show that this is the same CD.

So this is NOT about different spacing..

I could certainly be wrong, but my sources say different.
Did you submit the info for both those CDs to gracenote, including the changes?

In 'Mastering Audio', p.36, B.K. states that changing a few frames in the spacing will result in a unique disc ID.

Below is an in depth example from wiki of how Gracenote's database calculates a unique CD ID.
The ID number is apparently based on three variables: track start times, total run time of CD, and the number of tracks. See below;

Example calculation of a CDDB1 (FreeDB) disc ID

"CDDB1 identifies CDs with a 32-bit number, usually displayed as a hexadecimal number containing 8 digits: XXYYYYZZ. The first two digits (labeled XX) represent a checksum based on the starting times of each track on the CD, mod 255. The next four digits (YYYY) represent the total time of the CD in seconds from the start of the first track to the end of the last track. The last two digits (ZZ) represent the number of tracks on the CD.

For example, suppose a CD contains a single track of duration 3610 seconds.

First we calculate the XX checksum by taking the sum of the track starting times mod 255. Since CDs have a 2-second offset from the start of disc data, XX becomes "02".

Second, the total CD play duration of 3610 seconds in hex is 0e1a, so YYYY becomes "0e1a".

Finally, there is one track on this CD so ZZ becomes "01".
So the full disc ID of the example CD is "020e1a01". Any CD which contains one track with a duration of 3610 seconds starting 2 seconds from the beginning of the CD will have this disc ID. To distinguish between different CDs which happen to have the same disc ID, the CDDB1 database is organized into multiple categories. If there is a conflict with different CD releases possessing the same CDDB1 id, they can be placed in a different category (such as classical, rock, blues, folk or misc). Sample code for calculating CDDB1 disc IDs in various programming languages is available on the web, such as in java."

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#How_CDDB_works

[billwarner]

I was able to speak with the Support Supervisor regarding my problem and this was her advice to avoid the problem in the future;

In the future, making CDs of slightly different lengths would
help substantially, even adding a blank track or an extra long ending
(or start) to a song would make these into separate entries here.
This is just an FYI for the next recording set.

[mrlouie]

if the instrumental album is only for pitching to music supervisors it doesn't need to have the exact spacing as the regular album. next time make the instrumental album same sequence but with 2 sec gaps between every song.

the music supervisor dosen't care about album spacing, they are looking for single songs to pull off and use so thats why the instrumentals dont need to have the exact album spacing, if the instrumental album ends up being a couple seconds longer (total time) because of more spacing it doesnt matter, just make sure the songs from the regular album & instrumental match each other.

if you do an album that has crossfades you more then likely want the instrumentals not crossfaded, song times will change between both but you need clean fronts & ends of the instrumentals.

i've done many instrumental versions of albums i have mastered for clients used for song placement and thats how i do it. i dont do any of the grace note stuff the label handles all that.

Once in a great while a client might want to release an instrumental version of their album, thats different, thats when you would match spacing exact.

Good luck with placement, its fun hearing stuff you worked on in a commercial, last year a song off the album i mastered for the group Band Of Skulls got placed in the national spot for new 2011 Ford Mustang .. it played alot durning the NBA finals.

louie