CDDB tag data to iTunes with FLAC Files

Preface

I strongly recommend that people only use this technique if they are dealing with lossless audio files. Doing this with lossly audio (mp3, AAC, OGG ect) will result in transcoding the data. meaning it will have been encoded twice. See the Wikipedia Article on transcoding for why this is bad.

Setting Up

You will need to have a copy of toast 7.0 or above in order to do this.

Gathering Files

This trick might not work if you FLAC files have not been properly ripped. please see the other article on properly ripping FLAC on a mac.

  1. Open Toast and select the audio tab
  2. Take the FLAC files from an officially released album, It has to be the actual tracks on one CD, will not work with mixes.
  3. Select all of the tracks "CMD + A"
  4. Set the pause to zero seconds
In Toast set the puase of the FLAC audio files to zero

Making a Disc Image

Now we will create a disc image from the files.

  1. To create a disc image press "CMD + D" or "File > Save As Disc Image"
  2. Save it to your desktop, don't bother naming it anything it doesn't matter, you will be discarding it after you are finished anyway, &My CD.Sd2f" is fine.
  3. if you get a message that the first track needs a 2 second pause, just click ok. otherwise toast should just do it automatically.

Mounting the Disc Image

After it is done writing the disc image

  1. press "CMD +Shift +M" or go to "Utilities > Mount Disc Image"
  2. Then Open iTunes
Mount the audio disc image in Toast

Getting Track Data

iTunes Should Now get the official CDDB tags for the tracks. If it didn't there are a couple reasons this could happen.

  1. You have a bad rip of the record
  2. You have an unusually obscure CD
iTunes should connect to the CDDB and access all of the tracks tags.From my understanding, the CDDB uses the combination of track lengths and track numbers to determine what CD it is. I am not sure if subtle disc read offsets will make it unrecognizable or not.

Finishing Up

After you import your CD however you like, unmount the disc image and delete it, you will never need it again, as long as you keep the original FLAC files.

Best Practices

Personally I compress all of mine FLAC files to V2 with iTunes-Lame. Then i burn all of the FLACs to DVD. I am sure there will be a day when iTunes or OS X has better support for FLAC and would rather not get involved with Apple's slightly icky ALAC format. The real benefit of this approach it that i can just delete my compressed mp3s any time i am short on space and if i want them back, i can just re-encode from the burned FLAC files.

see also: Ripping FLAC with a log on Mac OS X with xACT