How they do it

You know when you pop a CD in a computer and one of the media players tells you the list of songs on the CD? I always figured that the info was encoded on the CD itself, but it turns out that what happens is that when the computer communicates with Gracenote's CDDB catalog, it's a very simple process. The only data iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc. send are the number of songs on the CD and the length of each song. Turns out that the possible variations of these numbers is pretty endless and varied and the CD is identified by that information. Wired Blog

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