Recording Workshop II - Register your CD ID

Image via WikipediaAfter recording and mastering your songs, you shouldn't forget to register your CD. Old CDs have no ID's. Most amateur recordings have no ID. You have probably already put some CD's on your computer. You get mostly all infos in your music player: Name of the artist, name of the album, the titles of the songs, the genre, year of release etc. The record company put the infos on the CD's and register the infos to a data base.
It's not only annoying for the listener not to get the infos, it's necessary these days for the radio stations, for iTunes, song relising programmes etc.

If you're recording and mastering yourself you should register your songs. If there's a record company or a professional recording studio behind the recordings they will do it for you.
Windows (Media Player) has it's own register data base. And as I know you have to pay for the registrations but I'm not really sure. But it's really not very necessary to register to Windows.

With your mastering programme you have to give an ID to your songs.
Go to freedb.org and register your album for free. But that's not all, cause not every player will recognise your album or your songs. There are other data bases, but as I can see feedb.org is the most important, and biggest data base.

Go to quinnware.com and download their player for free. Burn your CD to a CD-R or a CD-RW. Open the "qmp" player, put your burned CD into the slot. qmp will ask: "Do you want to register the CD" push "yes"
all infos should be seen on most music player now. I tried 6 player and the Windows Media Player was the only one what couldn't read the infos.
New CD-player that show the track and album infos should read your CD infos, too.
But don't forget to burn the infos to your tracks.

WaveLab from Steinberg is the best known audio editing and mastering programme. It's often used with the Cubase studio programme. It's really professional and highly recommended. But very expensive.
Most musicians are anyway skint like I am. In this case I'd recommend to try out the much cheaper audio editing and mastering programme from Magix. The Music Cleaning Lab. I've got the 2007 deluxe edition but I guess the recent versions are a bit better. In my opinion the Cleaning Lab is the best substitute if you cannot afford the WaveLab.
Of course there are other great programmes out there, but I haven't try. So I ca't tell anything about these programmes. Your local dealer will help you out.