A Contre-Courant

I’m occasionally fascinated by the technology behind CDDB. It’s usually pretty fool-proof, but occasionally it goofs. This evening, I popped in a CD by Corsican singer Alizée (because, you know, sometimes one just wants to hear the studio version of J.B.G.), and iTunes responded with this:



I had been under the impression CBBD used a unique identifier found on each CD title, but a few years ago, a guy in New York uncovered a major scandal of plagiarized classical recordings attributed to the recently deceased pianist Joyce Hatto, just by sticking one of her CDs into his computer--whereby iTunes promptly identified it as a recording by the real pianist. Supposedly it did this by comparing the track lengths; obviously not using any kind of unique identifier.

So: is Alizée's 2000 album Gourmandises really a recording of Dvorak’s greatest hits? This would be an interesting twist, considering her second album contains a song that sounds remarkably like the song Joe Satriani is suing Coldplay for supposedly stealing—except hers predates both of theirs by years. (Youtube once had numerous mash-ups of all three songs all together and versus one another, until Evil Music Industry Records pulled them all for copyright violations--go figure. This is the best I can find if you want to make up your own mind.)

Now clearly Dvorak is involved…the plot thickens :)