I get a lot of CDs sent to me as part of my work for EM, and I’ve noticed that with many independent releases, when I go to play them in iTunes, they show up without any of their track names or CD/artist info. If you’re sending your CD around, or selling copies, you want people to be able to see that info. Since iTunes is on all Macs and on a lot of PCs, it’s very important to get that info into its database if you’re releasing your own CD.

The database that iTunes uses is called CDDB, and it’s from a company called Gracenote . When you load a CD into iTunes that’s had its data uploaded to CDDB, it’s identified based on the length and order of the songs on it, which collectively act as a unique identifier. The idea is that no two CDs will be entirely identical in those respects. That’s also why when load a single song into iTunes, it sometimes shows up with the name of another song. That happens because your song’s duration matched something in the database. If you want more info on how CDDB works, check out this entry from Wikipedia on the subject.

Anyway, if you want to upload your CDs track info to the database so that anybody who plays it will see the track info, this is what you do:

1) Put the CD into your computer and open iTunes.

2) Select all the tracks in the iTunes window.

3) Hit “Get Info” (command-I), and enter in the common info (album name, artist, year, genre, copyright info, etc.).

4) Select each track individually, hit Get Info, and enter its correct name.

5) Go to Advanced>Submit CD Track Names. Your info will be uploaded to CDDB. Once it’s processed in their system, when anybody puts your CD into iTunes, all of your information will show up.

Before uploading, be sure that you have everything correctly entered, including the song order. If you submit the wrong info, it can be a hassle to change it. To do so, you have to contact Gracenote, it can take a while, and in the meantime, people will be seeing incorrect info when they put your CD into iTunes.