« iTunes: The week in review | Main | Afternoon Links »
March 07, 2005
They know what we are listening to
Have you ever seen iTunes display the message "Getting Track Names" after you load a CD into your computer? iTunes accesses a large online database that contains the artist, album title, and song names and automatically displays this information for you. If you rip the songs onto your hard drive or iPod, this information automatically gets encoded into the ID3 tags of the song file so that the track and artist information will display whenever you play the song. Handy, to say the least.
Gracenote is the most popular online CD database and it's the one that iTunes uses. MSNBC has an article entitled, "They know what we are listening to" that profiles Gracenote. If you ignore the obligatory Big Brother sensationalism that they pepper into the article, it is an interesting glimpse into this company.
Posted on March 7, 2005 07:15 AM | Category: Not directly iPod related…
