Busted by iTunes!

Now here’s something interesting. Apparently a (now deceased) pianist released a series of CDs under her own name that were actually identical to other previously released CDs by other artists!

I’ve had it happen a few times that I would put a rather obscure CD into my computer and CDDB would incorrectly identify it as something else. This is because their key to identifying a CD is the number and length of all of the tracks, which generally is unique, but of course it’s not impossible for two CDs to have the same number of tracks, and for their respective lengths all to match. Out of the 700 or so CDs in my collection, I’d say 10 to 15 of them had this happen when I ripped them in iTunes.

Usually the false matches are so obviously wrong that there’s little room for confusion, but in this case things were different!