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How Does It Work? - Gracenote Media Database

The Gracenote Media Database is a collection containing information on millions of CDs, DVDs and music tracks.

Why is it so useful? Well, when the Red Book standard for audio CDs was created back in 1980, no-one considered including artist and track title information on the disc. So a conventional CD player simply displays the track numbers when playing music. Later standards, such as the MiniDisc from Sony did contain artist and title information - but MiniDisc never really caught on as a pre-recorded medium.

Since the advent of the Internet, it has been possible for CD players to look up the title and artist information for a CD from a remote database as the disc is playing, using the table of contents information encoded on the CD (basically this is timing information showing the length of each track - the system relies on no two CDs having exactly the same number of tracks of exactly the same length).

Once this possibility was realised, several such databases of CD information grew up on the Internet, mostly using data freely contributed and entered by the general public - these include Gracenote, freedb, AMG LASSO and MusicBrainz

So Gracenote is not the only media database available on the Internet, but it has become the de facto standard among hi-fi manufacturer's wanting to build CD identification into their products.

One downside to Gracenote and some other CD databases is that, since the data was entered by the public without strict editorial supervision, the information in the database may be duplicated or incorrect.

Link: Gracenote