A while back, Mitch Friedfeld wrote:

>When your media player of choice spins up a CD, it portrays on screen
>the track numbers, name of song, even album art.  A few months ago I
>discovered that a Thomas Hampson CD I have was incorrectly labeled:...
>
>I am right now listening to disc 4 of the American String Quartet's
>Mozart cycle.  The album art portrays a group called Mozart.  ...

Mitch has discovered, as many of us have, I'm sure, that these online
music databases are at best hit-and-miss for classical releases.  Each
commercial CD is supposed to have a unique identifier burned into the
CD header, and 99.99% of the CDs I've encountered have this ID.  (Much
of the info concerning titles, performers, tracks etc.  could also be
included in the CD header, but this has never caught on.) When your
Internet-enabled CD player reads a new CD, and you are connected to the
Internet, it uses this ID to access an online database.  With all the
consolidation in the industry, there are only a handful (if that) of
companies who market music databases.  For those of you not familiar
with this, these services are electronic databases similar to the old
Schwann catalogs, ostensibly listing and cross-referencing details about
all available recordings.  Schwann, a long-time resource for the classical
collector, has since gone away (bought by One Stop, a music marketing
conglomerate, and then apparently killed, though you can get still
get a taste of how it would have worked as an online database at
http://www.schwann.com/online/info.html).  Muse used to be another
biggie (some may remember the kiosks in Tower Records and elsewhere)
that apparently has abandoned music cataloging to pursue the interactive
multimedia experience.  The only two significant online services I know
about are All-Music Guide (http://www.allmusic.com/), and Gracenote
(http://www.gracenote.com/) which sucked up the old CDDB database among
others.  When you use Windows Media Player it accesses AMG, while other
software such as Roxio's Easy CD Creator accesses Gracenote, for example.
These are licensing deals whereby the software vendor (Microsoft and
Roxio in this case) pay their respective companies for the rights to
access their online database directly.

In the pop/country/hip hop/R&B/etc.  part of the world, there are millions
of listeners who provide immediate and voluminous input if an error is
seen, at least as long as the latest hit is in the public eye.  Classical
music lovers, being both less numerous and less tech-oriented on average,
seem to provide less input, so errors in online databases are abundant,
and sometimes quite humorous.

Aside from the "cool" factor, which I agree is significant, I don't see
a lot of point to worrying about whether either database is up to date.
The main attraction seems to be for music pirates who want to make copies
of CDs and still have instant access to the cover art, song lists, etc.,
and people who want to rip music from CDs onto their hard drives.  Having
the player/ripper access the data saves the time it would take to enter
the data yourself.  It could be very useful for classical CD collectors
if there was an excellent cataloging program out there that could access
a reliable online database and store info locally so we could track our
collections.  But it seems that the best cataloging programs are either
standalone, such as ClassiCat, or not oriented to classical recording
collections.  Most of us who have a strong interest in cataloging have
already defined our own systems, whether they be in a word processor, a
spreadsheet, or relational database.  And, in any case, accuracy in the
classical music side of the commercial online services is not a top
priority.  I've been working on my relational database (now in Access)
for 18 years now and feel I have a pretty good idea what makes a good
classical database (mine has now reached 690MB in size as I have begun
including cover art).

For about two years I was the classical music editor for AMG and had full
access to their database.  It was not impressive, and one of the reasons
I discontinued my association is that there was virtually no commitment
to the classical side.  Jazz and pop/rock/etc. were top priorities.  It
took literally years for submissions that I made to AMG to appear.  Don't
get me wrong, I'm not knocking AMG - I use them all the time to look up
info on jazz and rock performers and albums - but a rigorous approach
and dedication to covering the world of classical recordings simply is
not present.  And I know why: there's no money in it.  Music is seen as
entertainment, and the entertainment dollars come from the 15-25 year-old
age group, not exactly the demographic associated with classical music
lovers.

So, the point of this long ramble?  I guess what I'm saying is that we're
lucky if these online services get it right 70% of the time, and I doubt
it will improve much in the future.

Dave
[log in to unmask]
http://www.classical.net/