My mind got stuck on an idea today that I can’t just shake free. Earlier today I began wondering if there’s a unique ID that’s assigned to every version of a song by different artists?
I’m somewhat familiar with services like Gracenote and their CDDB functionality, but after doing a bit of research on their service, I don’t think it works like I’m wondering or guessing.
If I rip a CD of my music, once it becomes a digital file, what identifies each song as each song? Is there a unique ID that tells me my copy of Dave Matthew’s “Under the Table and Dreaming” song is the same copy of the song other people have?
If the identical song and recording is available on another album, it would share the same MusicID number. However, if another album had a live recording of the same song, then that copy of the digital file would have a different MusicID number.
If you an I both owned that album and ripped that song to our hard drives, then the MusicID would be same for both of us.
If identifying music files isn’t already done with this functionality in someway, why not? I understand the features of metadata, but this isn’t quite like that although it could be incorporated into the metadata.
Part of my question today stemmed from whether or not two different companies could share a unique file identification system for music. If there were a shared system, then Amazon could read the file information for the songs I’ve downloaded from iTunes and or listened to on XM Radio or heard for the first time on Pandora.
Image: mafleen on flickr