I like to glance at iTunes while I’m listening to music and it drives me crazy when there are typos or other mistakes in track or song names. How can I fix them and improve my listening experience?
That’s a great question, actually. But let’s start with the underlying question of where do track names come from? Generally speaking, iTunes uses what’s known as the CDDB, the Compact Disc Database, to get all the track, song and CD information when you rip a CD on your computer. If you buy music online or have a friend share MP3’s with you, that already has track info on it, but odds are pretty good that it originated at CDDB. But don’t search for CDDB because now it’s known as the Gracenote CD Database. Gracenote is owned by Sony. So it’s… complicated.
If you have a CD of your own that you’ve produced, musician readers, you’ll want to pop over to Oasis Disc Manufacturing and read their article on how to add track info to your new CD. But if you’re not a musician and just want to fix typos and incorrect track names, well, it turns out to be pretty easy in iTunes!
Let me demonstrate with iTunes on the Mac platform. Here’s a CD I have that has a weirdly garbled track name:
Did someone not know how to spell “Bugle”? Maybe. In any case, the song title does not have a spelling mistake in it, so let’s clean this up so that Mr. Goodman can focus on his wailin’ clarinet!
Move the cursor over the right side of the track info, and the track time info is replaced by three dots. Click on ’em and a menu appears:
As highlighted, choose “Get Info” and you’ll see that there’s quite a lot of information tucked into each and every track of music in your iTunes database:
See the “title” field? That’s editable! Click in the field and fix the spelling. It’ll look like this:
While we’re editing things, however, you might want to fix any other inaccuracies. Like release year. Does it really matter? Perhaps not, but isn’t it better to be accurate? Now you do have to be a bit careful because if you change things in this particular Info window, it’ll fix just this one track. For now, I’ll be okay with that:
I’ve fixed the release year and added the production company in the comments. A better strategy to fix the entire CD, however, would be to select all the tracks in iTunes, then when you choose Get Info it’ll be an overview of all tracks. A fix then applies to every single track. This is a great way to fix typos in album name or artist name rather than going track by track.
Either way, now you know how to get into the data to edit your iTunes music. Fix things up (and you can add better artwork if you have a better album cover or similar too) and you’ll be able to relax and enjoy your tunes:
Much better, no question. And now, back to the tunes…
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Mac and Apple software for quite a while. Please check out my Mac help area for tons more tutorials. Like more than a big, fat book’s worth of content. All free for the click!