I have a lot of CD rips from over the years that have been ripped with Apple iTunes/Music.
In most cases I don’t have the original CD any more.
I am exploring tagging these with MusicBrainz because the Apple tags are kind of random.
I am familiar with the process in Picard but targeting the exact release that matches the CD is an issue.
I have found that the CD DISCID is more reliable than the usual lookup method. But this needs an actual CD (that I don’t have) or a “log file”.
About 80% of my CD rips contain a ‘CDDB1 Info’ tag (as reported by exiftool or ‘itunes_cddb_1’ as reported by Picard). This tag is apparently automatically added by the Apple ripper in most cases. It contains all the info required to create the DISCID.
I have written a script to convert this tag into a fake rip log that Picard/Lookup CD/from ripper log file can read. I can point Picard at this file and it gets a better targeted release.
This seems like a kind of obvious thing and I’m surprised I can’t find direct Picard support for CDDB1 Info. I’m sure a lot of people rip with Apple iTunes/Music so there would be a good market for the function.
Am I missing something with Picard as it stands? maybe a plugin? or is this not implemented?
No, there is currently no existing function to search for releases by disc ID stored inside the tags, even less so for this iTunes tag. But sounds like a useful addition.
(eng)iTunes_CDDB_1 and (eng)iTunes_CDDB_TrackNumber: These seem to be rarer, and it is unknown what creates them (perhaps a CD that cannot be found in Gracenote?) This one is much more feasible, as it actually has an ASCII representation of the TOC. It appears to be in the normal CDDB hash, with the Discid first then the number of tracks, and then the offset of each track in LBA form until lead out. This is concatenated by "+"s.
iTunes Tagging: Seems to be done, a little like WMA using the rare field iTunes_CDDB_1, Chungalin says it is: