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Topic: Gracenote GUID/COOKIE in your tags, remove them? (Read 5037 times) previous topic - next topic
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Gracenote GUID/COOKIE in your tags, remove them?

Lots of my music files have been tagged by Winamp which is powered by Gracenote (Sony). I noticed that after tagging, some custom fields are added like:

GN/EXTDATA
GRACENOTEEXTDATA
GRACENOTEFILEID

Gracenote's privacy policy is quite clear and states that they won't use this to track individuals and that the usage is benign. However, this info can still be exploited by others and what Gracenote did with CDDB was quite nasty.

I'm curious what other people think of this policy and if they remove these tags from their files (which I'm certainly considering doing).

thanks!

PS I know that there are several alternatives to Winamp for tagging, but I'd still would like to use the program. I can always use mp3tag to remove those Gracenote fields.

Gracenote GUID/COOKIE in your tags, remove them?

Reply #1 –
A simple rule perhaps would be to delete any fields/tags you don't/won't use.
I imagine that would include this Gracenote data. Does it have any use to you?

C.
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

Gracenote GUID/COOKIE in your tags, remove them?

Reply #2 –
Not sure about the Extended Data.  but the file ID is definitely NOT tied in any way to you.  Any instances of a particular song on any person's machine should have identical file IDs

Gracenote GUID/COOKIE in your tags, remove them?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: carpman on
A simple rule perhaps would be to delete any fields/tags you don't/won't use.


That's a very bad recommendation to the general audience! People who have done this regularly complain here why their gapless playback, sound check, or whatever device compatibility doesn't work anymore. As long as no unique user or machine IDs are saved within files, removing unknown tags just doesn't have any practical advantages. Due to the clustered nature of most file systems it doesn't even save space.

Gracenote GUID/COOKIE in your tags, remove them?

Reply #4 –
I agree that there aren't any practical advantages by erasing the tags. However, I still think that Gracenote knows a bit to much by tying my whole collection together with a unique ID (extdata).