Music Formats question

[BanjoTom]

IMatch is a powerful organizer for music in the .MP3 format, and I also have some .M4A audio files that were easily imported.  My question is: can I somehow use IMatch to organize audio CDs (without ripping all the CD audio to MP3 format?)  I'd love some guidance or suggestions about how this great DAM can help with my large collection of audio CDs, if that's possible and not too difficult to do . . .

[Mario]

CDs store tracks in files with the .CDA extension. IMatch by default does not read these because there is no thumbnail, ExifTool cannot extract information etc.  The file names are meaningless, usually just Track01, Track02, ... Trackn

You can index CDs in your database. When you use the friendly name feature in the Media & Folders View you can even display the title of the CD.  If you want to see the individual files contained on the CD, you can add the .CDA file extension as a custom file format under Edit > Preferences > File Format. But the file names are not meaningful and neither IMatch nor ExifTool can extract any usable metadata. You can enter titles, descriptions etc. for these files in XMP data, or even MP3 data and IMatch will keep that info in the database (no write-back to CD-ROM's of course). But when you enter the metadata you can use data-driven categories to organize and find titles on your CDs.

To try this out I actually had to go down into the cellar and fetch a CD from my archive   I digitized my entire (huge) CD collection many years back into high-quality MP3 files and never looked back. That was quite an effort (I used a tool which can download the album cover art, put's thumbnails in each MP3 file and downloads the titles, artists, lyrics etc. from the CDDB), but worth it. All music I purchased since then was in MP3 format. IMatch makes my 20,000 music files easily accessible via data-driven categories.

[BanjoTom]

Thanks, Mario, for the quick and very helpful reply.

What powerful tool(s) did you use to first convert your audio CDs into MP3s, and then to

download the album cover art, put thumbnails in each MP3 file and download the titles, artists, lyrics etc. from the CDDB

?  I think many potential users of IM who are not even much concerned with image management might be won over to the DAM concept if they could see a clear path to accomplish this task with their music CDs.   

[JohnZeman]

I have no idea what Mario uses but for 6 years now I've been using Audials Tunebite to rip CDs and DVDs.  It'll also convert just about any music or video anything to whatever you want. 

http://audials.com/en/tunebite/index.html

[sinus]

I use a program called RippMe.
I think, it is very good, but I am not an audio-specialist.

[Menace]

MusicBee.