Identifying music on a burned CD

June 6, 2022 3:04 PM

I found an old burned CD. How do I find out what the songs are on it without playing each one?

I'm looking for some kind of program that I can drop ripped mp3 files into that can identify the music. I know playing each song and using Shazam or something like it is an alternative, but I'd rather do this as automatically as possible.

posted by Hactar to Technology (8 answers total)

have you popped it into a computer-based media player - many cds have track and artist information included, especially ones that have been ripped, because ripped cds generally aren't that old and they tech to put that info on them has been in existence the since cd burning became popular.


Short of that, I'm not aware of any that are at all accurate. Even apps like Shazam are only good for music that was at least moderately popular
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:16 PM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Give Picard a try - that's pretty much what it was designed for.
posted by offog at 3:21 PM on June 6, 2022 [6 favorites]

Seconding Picard. Media player programs generally key off of some metadata for track lists that will only be the same for exact copies of a CD, so if it's a mix CD with tracks from various sources, it likely won't work for that.
posted by Aleyn at 6:36 PM on June 6, 2022

Many media programs like Media Monkey (free) or the Roxio tools like "Easy CD & DVD Burning" include functions for 'tag editing' which are used to maintain the ID3 tags within the MP3 files; opening a file in the tag editor will show you the information in those tags.

If you use Windows, you can set the attributes for a folder for 'music' and then you will see some of that information as well, plus you can add fields to the file manager display (such as length, in minutes and seconds, of the track)
posted by TimHare at 8:50 PM on June 6, 2022

Correction - in my last paragraph I meant you can set the attributes for a library, not a folder, to optimize for 'music', which then changes the default attributes for folders within that library
posted by TimHare at 9:00 PM on June 6, 2022

Sliding the CD into a drive in your computer and opening explorer/finder/whatever may well show you the song titles as file names (I would't trust them 100% unless I ripped and saved them myself, though). As Aleyn says, some media player use an online database to get track names etc, so I would avoid these at this stage. My next step would be to right-click and look at the properties - mp3 files often have all or some of the relevant metadata in them and that may give you more info.

Other than that, I think you're stuck with playing at least the start of each song and using Shazam (or your own memory) or similar. One issue you may come across is that Shazam often identifies songs correctly, but not the artist, because there are so many cover versions of songs and it seems a bit random as to which artist it will select.
posted by dg at 9:38 PM on June 6, 2022

If you use Picard, it might not find anything if you use the Lookup function (if it's a homemade compilation for example it won't match any albums and therefore might not return any results), but there's a Scan option that will look at each file and attempt to match them individually.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 7:58 AM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, my answer assumes you're dealing with a standard Audio CD that can be played in any CD player (not just ones that support MP3 files), as in general I'd imagine the metadata available to you with mp3 files to be somewhat better.
That said, you may need to rip the CD to files for Picard to work for you now that I think about it; I think it may use the same CD metadata lookup system for CDs as most other media players do, I don't think it will actually do the audio fingerprinting mechanism straight off the CD like it can do for ripped MP3 files.
posted by Aleyn at 5:52 PM on June 7, 2022