How to choose track times for a new release?

MusicBrainz
1

Hi. First time posting here; I’ve added a tiny bit of stuff before to MusicBrainz, but this is the first time I’ve had a question. I was attempting a rip of a CD using morituri, and it told me I first needed to add the release to MusicBrainz (presumably so it’d have access to metadata with which to tag the ripped/encoded files). It constructed a disc ID and a URL for adding that disc ID. I headed off to that URL, and MusicBrainz provided me with a CD stub; so most of the work was done. Except . . .

. . .except the track times in the stub didn’t match the track times I see when I look at the CD in a player. They’re close – some are correct, some are off by one second. In looking into this in more detail, I discovered that the track times I’m shown for the tracks on the disc depend on which CD player software I use. I tried four different player programs: two matched each other; the other two agreed with the first two on some tracks, and differed by a second on others. Those last two didn’t agree with each other, and none of the four agreed with the set of times on the stub. And of course, the times on the back of the CD case were very very different from what the players or MusicBrainz’ cd stub suggested.

How do I choose times to use?

2

If you submitted a Disc ID, there is no problem.
Not only in this case you don’t have to choose but you even cannot choose, times are set with their milliseconds in track times and are not editable.

Let’s take that track time for instance:
2:34.534 means 2 minutes, 34 seconds and 534 milliseconds (luckily enough, scientists decided that there were 1000 milliseconds in 1 second).

Some good players will display 2:35 (because they round to the closest second, here 534 is more than half of 1000) and some less good players will display 2:34 (because they just truncate out the milliseconds, without proper rounding).

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3

So the track times are encoded in the disk ID? Cool – I did not know that.

I haven’t submitted it yet because I wanted to figure this time issue out before proceeding to submit the ID and edit the release.

Thanks for helping me out!

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