Rob to the rescue...

Rob to the rescue!  I've been trying to rip all of our CDs to finally integrate our music collection into a single place.  And I am of course fanatical about the song tags.  Here's a great tip for naming songs that can't be identified by CDDB.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070400062.html

Fast Forward's Help File

By Rob Pegoraro

Sunday, July 6, 2008; Page F02

Q I've got an old mix CD, and I don't know the names of all the songs on it. Is there any way to look them up online?

A Music-manager programs such as iTunes and Windows Media Player can look up song titles on mass-produced CDs by matching the sequence of track times to an online database, but they can't do that with one-of-a-kind or few-of-a-kind compilations.

Assuming you're not dealing with instrumentals, you can try searching the Web for an unusual phrase in an unknown song's lyrics. But you may have better results with a specialized music-tagging program that will analyze multiple characteristics in a song, not just its time, to identify it.

A site called MusicBrainz ( http://musicbrainz.org) offers a few free programs to do this job, such as Picard for Windows and the charmingly named iEatBrainz for Mac OS X. I tested the latter -- a simple program that elegantly integrates with your iTunes library -- on two mix-CD mystery tracks, and it labeled both correctly.