Although I love iTunes - see alone the number of postings I made here in this forum - I still think that CDDB, which is used to retrieve the song names of inserted CDs, has quite a lot of room for improvement.

Yes, it's the most comprehensible music database in the web - but No, it's not very "Mac like", and even more, it's not very well maintained.

In particualar, the lack of internationalisation-support is more than annoying.

I have a large collection of CDs from around the world. Call it "World Music", call it "Rarities", anyway half of it is either not in the CDDB, or full of typos - or (most of them) with the wrong text encoding.

If only CDDB would use Unicode to store the song names, iTunes could do the smart thing and either display it in the right font - or transliterate to any other writing system.

Well, does anybody know an e-mail address at apple where I could drop these suggestions? :-)

Greetings

/sascha

Puh, during a long coding session yesterday (did I already mention that I hate VBA?) I submitted not less than 4 new CDs to CDDB.

One of them (Leonard Cohen: Songs of Love and Hate) was plainly wrong in the DB. Two others (Alkestis Protopsalte: Paradextiko and another I don't remember) were transliterated wrongly (Greek and East European), and the last (Stephan Micus: Implosions) wasn't in there at all.

Most likely however, the work was for nothing, as the DB doesn't support proper encodings.

Even worse. The categories that CDDB offers are - well, sub-optimal.. If everything that doesn't fit to the "classic" categories is either "experimental" or "unclassificable", it's not very helpfull.

Here are a few categories I added in iTunes (but CDDB doesn't allow them)

- Meditative
- Acoustic
- Raï
- Finnpop
- Old Farts (I love this one ;-)
- World-Jazz
- Lappjokk
- Humppa
.. etc.

Well, not everyone likes to be put into the category "Old Farts", but why not "Raï" and other World Music styles?

/sascha