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Situation

Software: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Banshee 2.6.2, Sound Juicer 3.5.0, Rhythmbox 3.0.2, Brasero 3.10.0

I successfully burnt several music CDs with Banshee via Brasero. These CDs have author-and-title metadata. I can view these metadata via Sound Juicer and Rhythmbox, but not with Banshee, which is expected as of No Track info after burning CD on Banshee

Aim

Nonetheless, I want to copy the CD content into a text document and make a cover, way after having burnt the CDs. I cannot seem to find a way to copy and paste, or export the track lists I view with the music players above. So it seems that the only way is to copy this information manually in donkey-work mode.

Strictly, this problem is unrelated to the fact that I have burnt the CDs home. This applies to any music CD with metadata.

Questions

  • Is there an automated possibility of export the tracklist metadata of a music CD?
  • Is there perhaps a temp file of sorts living in my computer (from Rhythmbox, Sound Juiser and the like) that I can copy and edit to this end?
Community
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XavierStuvw
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  • As far as I know, all of the software you mention get the metadata and cover art from the internet; Music Brainz, CDDB, et al. Please see: https://www.howtogeek.com/239422/do-music-cds-contain-the-necessary-metadata-for-the-tracks-on-them/ – chili555 Nov 26 '17 at 15:08
  • I tried earlier to launch Musicbox on a music collection that I burnt while the network was disconnected, and could still see the table of contents. This does not exclude that the TOC had been put together earlier and stored. Nonetheless, your post (thx) does mention that text is a rarity in the general market but a possibility. For my purpose it would be useful to know whether the music-player software holds a list in text format somewhere, wherever it has taken from. So I can move on from it in the lack of a tracklist-export capability. – XavierStuvw Nov 26 '17 at 15:50
  • Not the answer yet, but closer: https://askubuntu.com/questions/95160/where-does-banshee-store-playlists-and-podcast-metadata – chili555 Nov 26 '17 at 17:36
  • That text information can exist in a CD is also proved by the media-player's request "Could not find [such an album] on [such an database]. You can improve [such a database] by adding this album." This implies that the album has some information that the database hasn't got, and the album is the repository of such info. Unless, of course, that message is completely misleading in the first place. – XavierStuvw Nov 27 '17 at 14:17
  • As I said above, I am unaware of any commercial CD that contains track listings in the form of metadata. The encouragement to improve the database is because you the person and not the CD itself (in the form of metadata) have the track listings either on the cover or printed on the CD. It is an invitation for you to do the donkey work. – chili555 Nov 27 '17 at 15:26

2 Answers2

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I have used the tool cd-info after sudo apt-get install libcdio-utils. The man page of this tool is available from https://linux.die.net/man/1/cd-info.

Launching it produces a long output, at the end of which one gets the CD Analysis Report, looking like 

CD-TEXT for Disc:
    TITLE: Selection
CD-TEXT for Track  1:
    PERFORMER: Ray Charles
    TITLE: Georgia on my mind
...

This can be redirected to a text file and edited. This CD is one I burnt from tracks whose information was taken from the local database (specifically: Banshee as player, Brasero as burner). This answers the question of how to export tracklist metadata into a text file for CD's that have been burnt home.

For other CD's coming from the market the field CD Analysis Report is empty, and one rather notices this other pieces of information

Media Catalog Number (MCN): 0724357134729
TRACK  1 ISRC: USCA20100360
TRACK  2 ISRC: USBR10000007
TRACK  3 ISRC: USCA29600681
TRACK  4 ISRC: USCA20100337
...

which is arguably used by media players to fetch the metadata from an external database (in the lines of what chili555 has pointed out in this thread). This is a case in which no plain information is available to the user. ISRC stands for International Standard Recoding Code (wikipedia). For marketed CD's the other answer in this thread offers one possibility.

Anecdote. I came across one marketed CD that contains both recording codes and readable track information as cd-info showed. Interestingly for this one CD, neither Banshee nor Rhythmbox could fetch track information.

This is the best I could find so far. The ideal media-player should be able to import the tracklist metadata whether they reside in the CD or in a database, as well as to export it to an ascii file among other formats.

XavierStuvw
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2

Although I have not yet cracked the safe at ~/.config/banshee-1/, if all you need is plain text, then try abcde.

sudo apt-get install abcde

Drop the CD into the tray and, from the terminal:

abcde

If abcde is able to find the disk information remotely, you will see something like this:

Grabbing entire CD - tracks: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
Retrieved 1 Musicbrainz match...done.
---- Alison Krauss / Now That I've Found You: A Collection ----
1: Baby, Now That I've Found You
2: Oh, Atlanta
3: Broadway
4: Every Time You Say Goodbye
5: Tonight I'll Be Lonely Too
6: Teardrops Will Kiss the Morning Dew
7: Sleep On
8: When God Dips His Pen of Love in My Heart
9: I Will
10: I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby
11: In the Palm of Your Hand
12: When You Say Nothing at All

Edit selected CDDB data [y/N]?

As you can see, I am able to copy and paste from the terminal.

Before abcde actually rips the disk to your harddrive, abort with Ctrl+c.

chili555
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  • This is a partial answer: the result depends on the fact that it has retrieved a match from an external database. In my case, the output is Grabbing entire CD - tracks: 01 02 ... No CDDB match. ---- Unknown Artist / Unknown Album ---- 1: Track 1 2: Track 2 ... So abcde lacks some capability of reading the table of contents from inside the CD that Rhythmbox and Sound-Juicer have. – XavierStuvw Nov 27 '17 at 08:38