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Topic: Cross-platform (Win & Mac) Audio CD Tagging Method (Read 4462 times) previous topic - next topic
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Cross-platform (Win & Mac) Audio CD Tagging Method

I'd appreciate suggestions on a common Win & Mac tagging method for audio CDs. I use iTunes + cdparanoia on Mac, EAC on Win.

Background: I'm rather particular about tagging my CDs. Neither CDDB nor freedb are completely suitable for my needs, so what I do is retrieve data from CDDB via iTunes, save it to a text file where I correct it with a text editor, and get it back to iTunes. Thanks to iTunes' extensive AppleScript support, getting data from and to iTunes/Mac is fairly automatic. So on the Mac side, I'm alright, but I don't know how to get this data to EAC on the Win side.

Here's what I thought of.

(1) <CD Info.cidb> iTunes saves CD data to several files, including CD Info.cidb. The format is the same on Mac and Win, so I could copy CD Info.cidb over to Win, and iTunes/Win would use the same data as iTunes/Mac -- but I don't know how to make EAC get data from iTunes, or how to make iTunes/Win export data in a format understood by EAC.

(2) <cdplayer.ini> EAC exchanges data with cdplayer.ini, and I could convert my text file to cdplayer.ini format. But there are three problems: (a) the cdplayer.ini ID is not the same as the ID used by freedb, and I don't know how to calculate it on a Mac; (b) the cdplayer.ini format is limited, and I can't save in it data such as composer or year (especially for compilations, where they differ from track to track); © EAC seems to expect cdplayer.ini's text encoding to be CP1252, and doesn't import UTF-8 correctly.

(3) <local freedb> EAC can exchange data with a local freedb database. I can use the CLI tool discid to get the ID and track offsets, so I can convert the text file to freedb format. But there are two problems: (a) EAC seems to expect the file's text encoding to be CP1252, and doesn't import correctly UTF-8, which can be annoying; (b) the freedb format seems to be limited, although not as badly as cdplayer.ini, and I could dump some data in the EXT fields.

So, how do I get around this, so I can share the same database on Mac and Win?

Thanks in advance.