Why doesn't iTunes get track names when I rip CDs?

This didn't work for me. I am moving music from my pc to this mac. These songs are not directly off the original cd. My old desktop drive went bad. I had my music retrieved from the bad hard drive. Copied those onto my pclaptop (song names etc, exist on laptop. Now itunes won't import from burnt cd.

Please help.

Is there any way of getting song names on my itunes when I have already put my cds through when off line I have 11k songs unnamed, big job to do manually as my cds are not with me any more to be reloaded

Adam, it should work for you to select the CD or CDs in question, then choose "Get CD Track Names" from the "Advanced" menu (at least it does in the Mac OS X version of iTunes)

My mate has burnt heaps of albums straight from the net but wen i load them to itunes it doesnt have the track names.I have already changed my settings so it searchs for them on the net. Is there any other way of retrieving them????

Hi Dave,
I sing in a quartet and we have recorded a few of our songs using a Toneport Phantom mic system. I then import them into Sound Studio and check them out for sounds that we don't want and then import them into Itunes from there.
In Itunes the song list shows up fine. All the songs in the playlist are titles etc. But when I burn a CD for the guys to listen to, the song titles disappear and I only see Track 1, Track 2 etc in the burned CD. I can see everything just fine on my own computer that contains the original songs in Itunes, but my quartet members can only see Track 1, Track 2 etc. on their Itunes on their own computers.
What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for your help
Kerry

Just wanted to say thank you. Did a google search for this question and came up with your thread. You just saved me hours of useless entering of info. Thanks!!

Recently, when I rip a CD iTunes has been grabbing the album name as the track name! Most of my music is what most people would call Classical and I have to "Join" tracks a lot to get movements together. When there is only one "Joined" track on the disc, iTunes imports the track using the Album name??? What the...?

Jim
iTunes 8.0.2.20
Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (fully patched)

How do I get CD track names in iTunes? When I go to Advanced, "Get CD Track Names" is light grey instead of black. When I click on "Get Cd Track names" nothing happens.

Dave,

Thank you for the explanation on the CD info. My question though is this...Why should I have to utilize the internet to get my CD info? Windows Medica reads this directly from the CD. But, from what you're saying, ITunes forces you to utilize the internet to import this information. Why would this be, other than to systematically track people's music preferences and or purchases? Correct me if I am wrong...but don't you also have to have an itunes store account (with personal information) to have this work? I suppose I just have a problem with Itunes (unlike Windows Media) having set up a program that knows whether I still listen to Color Me Bad, Vanilla Ice etc. (I don't ;) ...but you get my point right?)_

Verify that Norton Internet Secuirty was not set to block the traffic from iTunes. I created the proper rules, and poof, now I can get my track names.

Hi, I have had the same issue as a number of people trying to get track names off the internet when downloading a CD to itunes. I have checked the tick box you mention assuming it isn't ticked, but it is.

can you advise what to check next

I have a similar issue. All of the right things are clicked. The CD was burned correctly to include track names. I try to open on my computer and it won't show the names. HOWEVER, when I put the disc in my car, it can read th names. It tells me the track # and the Title of the song. WHat the heck??????

i followed you steps and it still dint work what do i do?

Hi Dave - a supplementary question to this one: Why isn't iTunes importing CD track names even though I have the "Automatically retrieve CD track names from the Internet" option selected in preferences? I am using iTunes 9.0.2.25 on Windows XP.

Hope you can help!

Ya Dave i have Itunes 9 and i was wondering how do i do that on my ituens because it doesnt have that same menu and everything....and i get real annoyed when i look through my Itunes and i have songs that are named "Track 1" etc. and no album artwork even after i go online and jus type in lyrics but i have like 300 songs that are like this and that would take forever and im only 15 and thats alot of wasted time. so please help me. Oh and by the way this is on a pc not a mac or apple jus windows 7...or the lastest window and Itunes 9

Thanks for the great resource. I'm sure if more people did this than their iTunes names wouldn't me so messed up.

How do you tick all tracks in the main itunes library? some are ticked and some are un-ticked which means often an album will not play in order. Please help

Hi Dave

I am having problems with importing cd music...its really slow ..Is there a way to fix this.

KERRY AND OTHERS: when you burn a CD in iTures (or in general, even with Toast) it is converting the audio from the iTMS into aiff which is the standard Audio CD format. When you do that it loses all of the ID3 tags that contain the information and just puts down Track 01 etc. The reason that it doesn't matter with full albums is because when iTunes (or any audio player) connects to the CDDB databasem (now known as Gracenote) it can get all the track information (it looks at all of the track times and finds the matching album).

Only real way to get around it is to burn as an MP3 cd (iTunes -> Preferences -> Burning) which will allow you to put a lot more music and save the information. Only downside is most standard older stereos cant play these (but the track information doesn't even matter on those)... hope that helps.

my advanced does not look like that in preferences. and the header advanced will not highlight get track names.problem started with itunes 8. that is why so many people say i used to get track names on burnt audio mix cds and not now. do not want to make a data disc. do not want to download other music manager programs. never changed settings. do not have general,importing,burning selection bar you show. tiger 10.4,itunes 9. what is the fix? cause what ive read aint it.not in itunes anyway.

Hi Dave, thank you. Worked great for me. iTunes 9 on Win XP.

I was downloading cd's with no problem then all of a sudden, no more info. My advanced setting doesn't have, "General, Importing, Burning" in it. What do I do now? thank you

Thanks, this worked for me...

i did what u said except it was on a windows vista computer. i still didi it and it still dosent show the song names, album and etc.

HELP PLZ PLZ PLZ!!!!!

This is a good answer but it doesn't really answer the question. All of the track info is actually stored on every commercially produced CD. My question is why does iTunes require a person to be online to "download" the info from Gracenote? It's just another way for the man to keep track of what we're doing.

Actually, Del, the vast majority of audio CDs do *not* have the individual track information encoded on the disk. What they have is a unique numeric identifier that is used to look up the information in the public CD track database (Gracenote). There is a different CD format that includes this information - my car stereo knows it - but I have never found a music CD that actually uses it. :-(

Hi,
Thanks for your extensive and clear explanation on how to save CD names, etc. with iTunes. Problem is, the "Importing" section of the "Advanced" section in the latest iTunes (9.2.1) no longer exists -- at least for Mac OS! So your answers and graphics are unfortunately obsolete and I can't find a mention of the problem on the Apple site (!). I burned a CD from iTunes last night and the names weren't carried over load into a PC with iTunes, even though we had the PC go out to the web to retrieve graphics and names, etc. This used to work easily -- but now we're stuck with Track 1, 2, etc. Bummer. What to do?

try going to list view, find all tracks that need re-naming by sorting track name aphabetically. select first occurance of 'track 1' press shift and select last occurance of 'track [whatever -say 13]' right click and on sub menu select 'get track names'. this seems to work even though the option on the advanced tab is mysteriously greyed out.

Dave, slight difference to the problems above in that on buying an iTouch, i transferred 100 or so CD's with track names (using the gracenote database) to itunes without a hitch...then, all of a sudden, the function stopped working.....have tried all of the usual with no luck.....any idea as to why this would happen?

I burned cds to import music library from itunes to a new laptop. All the songs are coming over as track 1 track 2 etc. I have tried all of the suggestions I could figure out from the above posts and nothing works. Help please there are over 500 songs in my library.

Hi Dave,
I have downloaded itunes 10,followed all the above advice(ticked the retrieve cd info box etc)but cannot get the track names.Please help

I use itune10,
I was very glad to find this website
but unfortunately my problem cannot solve yet.

by the way , thank you very much for your work .

Get Track names under the advanced setting is in grey and I cant tick it. What should I do ?

hi
i did the latest update of itunes
now when i go to import a cd to itunes
it comes up with
itunes has stopped working i click ok
and itunes closes down
any help will be great

pete

I've tried all of the suggestions here and it still doesn't work. I may try saving them in a separate folder and then importing to itunes. What a major issue for software this popular!

This was such an easy problem to solve thanks to you Dave!
J

Dave,
So I have a mix CD burned by a friend from iTunes. My car stereo recognizes the track names, artists and his made up album name. iTunes apparently can't read this info., and can't find the info. on Grace. Any thoughts other than typing?
Thanks,
Edwin

When I first started using iTunes a couple of years ago, it extracted the Track name and Artist information off my CDs. Then, this stopped working. I have a slow, dialup connection to the Internet and iTunes now reports it cannot connect to GraceNote. I've owned some of these CDs for 15 years. I KNOW the data is ON the CDs. What program do I have to use retrieve it? What do other people limited by dialup (not even DSL) Internet connections do . . . ?

Hey, Dave -
Have downloaded iTunes 10 on (2) diff laptops. On my "old" laptop (XP), when I load a CD, I get Track 01, 02, etc. On my "new" laptop (Win7), I get the correct title, artist, album, etc.

Any ideas? Thanks for all your work/advice.

incredible....MULTIPLE websites/discussion boards regarding the subject this issue. See:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2595084&start=30&tstart=0

Seems the problem is ONLY appearing with version 10....Anyway, tried a couple of "suggested fixes", and the one that FINALLY fixed it was to:
1. Double-click the iTunessetup icon and act like I was doing a brand-new install.
2. Icon pops up that asked if I wanted to: a) Repair, or b) Install
3. Chose Repair.
4. Repair program runs and presto....I'm in business.

I'd say the next update to iTunes may address this :)

Thanks for all your help.

Norton Internet Security firewall was the culprit in my case.
Thanks for the hint!!

During the 70's/80's, I compiled cassette tapes of mixed songs to play when on the road - most tracks taken from LPs or other cassettes. Recently, I had the tapes converted to MP3 and burn to CD. Unfortunately, no song title/artist information was available. Is there any way for me to now get the song title/artist without have to go through each song one by one and try to remember titles/artists? I have copied the songs to my external hard drive; put them in my iTunes library - but no luck so far. Any suggestions? Thank you.

When I play an album using Microsoft Windows Player, the track names appear right away (even if my Internet connection is disabled) which makes sense because they are on the CD. So why don't they show up on Itunes???? They are on the CD. There is no need to get them from the Internet. So is this a flaw? I would say Yes.

My itunes is already set to do that but it still couldn't find the names and artist. Whats wrong??

Hi Dave, From your menu graphic it looks like you are using an Apple Mac but I am on Microsoft and your solution does'nt work, help.

Julie - sometimes it just can't match the CD to any known album (common if it's new or offbeat music, less common if it's just popular tunes like Lady Gaga or U2). In those cases, you should enter the track names, then select it all and choose ""Submit CD Track Names..." from the "Advanced" iTunes menu.

Ernest - I'm looking at the Windows version of iTunes and see "Get Album Artwork" on the "Advanced" menu. In "Preferences", "General", there's also a checkbox for "Automatically retrieve CD track names from the Internet" too. What are you seeing?

For iTunes v10 on Widows Vista (and maybe others) the 'select track(s) and right click method seems to work, even though the 'get track names' option is greyed out under 'advanced'. Thanks

Hello Dave,

I'm hoping that you'll be able to help with this. I have my Itunes library in my laptop. I was able to open it and transferred all the music (over 6,000 pieces) as a back-up, into my PC where I also have Itunes. I can only input the music by opening each folder (there are 49), selecting all, and dragging them into Itunes. (The program will not read the folder.) So far, so good.

Now - the problem(s).

Almost all the song titles show up with the 4 letter designation (example: KLNB). When I attempt to play it, it tells me that it cannot find it, yet it's all on the hard drive. At this point, all that's left is for me to re-enter all the music (a daunting task). The few songs that it does play are still titled (ABCD) and would require renaming.

Any suggestion(s) will be welcomed. Thank you in advance.

Justin

What if I want to change a group (say 100) mp3 track names, each having the same label with a one-up number following. For instance CD1-Track 1, CD1-Track 2, etc. What software is available that will make the one-up changes after I have selected multiple tracks?

Thanks for any help.

Mine wasn't working after these steps either until i finally just updated version of itunes. If you've done everything else you may need to update. i didn't even realize i wasn't running current version. now it's working like a charm. yay!

Thanks for all your help! Everything is good with the Song Title being transferred to my Mix CD. Titles show up on my car's player. I love it! QUESTION: Can I get the Title AND the artist to burn to the CD? (And show up on my player?) Thank you for your time.

This situation may have been addressed but if so I apologize for the old eyes (and brain) missing it.
Some forty years ago I played with an "old time" string band. We performed at a concert, a reel to reel tape of which has recently surfaced and been converted to a CD which I have downloaded onto my iTunes. The tunes, now part of a play list, show as "track 1", "track 2", etc. and I can`t for the life of me figure out how to add titles. "Grace Notes" will be of no help.
Let me sneak in a second question. Another old tape to CD has been put into iTunes(twice!) and I can`t find the thing anywhere(?) Ideas?

Thanks so much for helping out an old geezer who should probably be kept at a distance from anything more complicated than a dial phone.....

Got ya covered, Pete: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/add_track_names_titles_to_itunes_music.html

Like Paula and Edwin I'm also wondering how I can keep & transfer track information from a mix cd (not an original) to iTunes. Is there a way?

When I go to Preferences, Advanced I don't get the options of; General, Importing, Burning. Why is that and what can be done to get my track information without these options.