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

Every time I copy a music CD out of my collection onto my computer, it shows up with "Track 01", "Track 02", and so on. What the heck? Surely I don't need to manually enter all the track names for each of my hundreds of CDs as I rip them?

Dave's Answer:

You are experiencing something quite common for people who are starting out with Apple's popular, though not always loved, application iTunes. The problem is that there's a setting in the configuration of the program that indicates you want it to check for CD and track names online (at the CDDB music database, owned now by the innovative Gracenote company) and, well, you don't have it checked or selected.

I know from experience that if you don't have this set, importing CDs can be a huge pain as you have to type in the artist, album, all track names and, if you're fastidious, the year of release, total track count, and other trivia that does make it more enjoyable to explore your resultant music library.

Without it, here's what you're likely to see when you put in a CD:

Apple iTunes: No Track Names / Song Names / CD Name

That's pretty depressing, I must say! Fortunately, tweak that one setting and you shoudl never see that again.

To modify the setting, go to iTunes --> Preferences... and choose "Advanced" from the row of buttons along the top:

Apple iTunes: Preferences: Advanced: General

Next to "General" is "Importing". Click on that and you'll see the preference you want to tweak buried in the middle of this complex window:

Apple iTunes: Preferences: Advanced: Importing

The one you want to ensure is selected is "Automatically retrieve CD track names from Internet". Select that, eject the disk, reinsert it and things are oh, so much happier on insertion:

Apple iTunes: CDDB delivers up all the track song music album cd titles. yay!

Make that change in your own version of iTunes -- oh, and as usual, always make sure you have the very latest version of iTunes by checking the Apple download center -- and you should be able to happily and efficiently import your CD music collection.

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Categorized: Mac OS X Help (Article 7839)
Tagged: apple itunes, cd ripping, cddb, gracenote
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Comments

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.

Posted by: paula at May 16, 2008 3:32 PM

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

Posted by: adam at June 11, 2008 5:39 AM

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)

Posted by: Dave Taylor at June 12, 2008 3:01 PM

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????

Posted by: Jake Radatti at August 28, 2008 3:11 AM

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

Posted by: Kerry at October 24, 2008 7:03 AM

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!!

Posted by: Fred at November 18, 2008 1:20 AM

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)

Posted by: Jim at January 10, 2009 2:41 AM

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.

Posted by: Jimmy Peters at February 22, 2009 11:21 AM

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?)_

Posted by: btspac at March 8, 2009 12:12 PM

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.

Posted by: unamed at September 25, 2009 12:05 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!