Gracenote Inc. knows almost any time a CD is "ripped" for use in a portable music player. Apple, Creative and Rio use its service, as do hundreds of software products devoted to playing and recording music CDs. Yet, few consumers know much about Gracenote.
The company quietly provides an efficient and important service to digital music users. There's a common misconception that text-based information like song title, length of play, artist name, and the like, is contained on music CDs. That's rarely the case. Instead, when a CD is loaded into a computer CD tray, software such as Apple's iTunes automatically calls out across the Internet looking for help identifying the music. The questions are posed to Gracenote's CDDB, or CD database. By recognizing patterns in the data that is included on the CD -- such as the length of each individual track -- Gracenote figures out what the album is. Then, it transmits data, including music genre, composer name, language, year released, and more, back to the user's computer.
