Why does my ripped CD have messed up track names? And why is one track missing?
150 comments
·June 12, 2025retrodaredevil
CharlesW
MusicBrainz Picard is wonderful, but has one of the most unintuitive "first contact" experiences I can remember. If you're not sure how to get started, try this:
• Drag your album folders (one at a time so it doesn't get confused) into the pane that initially shows "Unclustered Files (0)" and "Clusters (0)".
• Select the "Clusters" folder in that pane and click "Lookup". This will find any close matches, and in my experience works ~25% of the time.
• For albums that weren't auto-matched, right-click the album folder name and choose "Search for similar albums…". As long as you're sorting by "Score", often you'll find a reasonably-good match in the top 5 options.
• NEVER use "Scan", basically.
For matched albums, carefully review things like album covers, titles, etc. before you "Save" the updated metadata. After using it to rebuild my personal music library, including ~200 contributions to the MusicBrainz database, I still haven't cracked (for example) how to stop Picard from defaultly replacing a perfect, 1500px album cover with a less-good, 1000px cover from its database.
lloeki
> MusicBrainz Picard is wonderful, but has one of the most unintuitive "first contact" experiences I can remember.
Seconded, it's the best specialised UI I've seen in a while.
By "specialised" I mean it's entirely bespoke to a specific task and no other, with a small amount of dedicated jargon, like those industrial control panels full of buttons, toggles, and blinkenlights.
At first it's completely alien and appears to do weird stuff, possibly counterintuitive even (the mentioned "Scan" usage†, "what are clusters?", "why do I even need to cluster first?", "how do I save changes?")
But once you get the hang of it it's incredibly efficient with a ton of small niceties, like dragging a selection of entries from the left side will apply whatever candidates you have on the right side to the selection in order starting from the first.
† I use scanning only when album matching fails for whatever reason, it does sometimes unearth entries that wouldn't appear otherwise.
hypercube33
I gave up and use Lidarr since it's a really easy interface ...until the metadata is missing from the API database then it's a hair pulling experience to learn the quirks of the culture that runs either of those cd databases.
null
sumtechguy
For cover art you can control it from options->options->cover art. There are also a couple of plugins for other sources.
There are a few items in there to control if it scans external or overwrite. Recently went thru this as apparently for some reason I had totally disabled it. Think I was trying to speed up scanning as it would download every artwork for a large group into the temp folder. I usually force it to make an external file. I pick what it suggested 'cover'. Then use something like fileoptimizer to recompress the jpg/png it comes up with. I do that because I like to embed the images. And much of what is out on the net is optimized for fast editing not 'archive'. I use mp3tag to put it back into the tag.
Scan is hit or miss. I have fed it whole albums and it will somehow find 3 other albums with some of the songs from that one. That could be because of how I have options->options->metadata->Prefered Releases set. That slider bar thing for some reason I can not wrap my head around. It is good for when you come across one of those items where someone else tagged it as 'weird al' (everything is weird al if it is funny). I have been slowly getting rid of that stuff but want to find the original album to buy. Musicbrainz can be good for that sort of thing. I have also had decent luck with it if I pre-add the albums then scan. It seems to find things better.
fsckboy
>NEVER use "Scan", basically
never use "scan" because it will never work? or because it is somehow destructive and will mess up your "cataloging"?
CharlesW
I have no doubt that it sometimes works, and would be happy to accept a verdict of "skill issue" if the problem is me.
Scanning a Cluster should (IMO) cause Picard to generate a series of AcoustID fingerprints/IDs from the tracks, then use that series to identify the best match (with extra points for handling missing tracks, etc.). But especially in the case of collections/compilations, the end result often resembles a transporter accident. Thankfully it's non-destructive, so it's straightforward to "Remove" all of the tracks you dragged in earlier along with the various albums that MusicBrainz created during the discombobulation process.
To be clear, my overall opinion of MusicBrainz and MusicBrainz Picard is that they are unappreciated triumphs. It would be nice if Wikipedia and Internet Archive diverted 0.01% of their fundraising to them. Google is the primary hero in their story, supporting them with over $500K so far. https://metabrainz.org/sponsors
mayneack
Yeah, imo using musicbrainz/picard is great for the process of bringing something into your collection. I encounter errors like others here have mentioned, but they're straightforward to fix. Importantly, it sets up a reference to an evolving update process so changes down the line can get back to my files cleanly.
prmoustache
What does "maintain" means in that context? Once you have ripped your cd and stored it somewhere there is nothing to maintain afaik (well appart than having backups if you don't want to ever rip them again).
retrodaredevil
Mostly I just use Picard it for initial tagging, which usually only needs to happen once. Sometimes Picard has changes it wants to do such as updating to a higher resolution cover art, or to refer to a different MBID after a merge.
Yeah, not much to maintain, but Picard does keep my tags up to date if necessary.
IAmBroom
The word implies "organize".
I have thousands of text files on my computer. I don't need to "maintain" them (beyond backups, as you mention), but if I want to find one that contains a particular phrase that I can't quite remember the exact wording for... I'd better hope I stored it in a meaningful directory's subdirectory's subdirectory, with a meaningful title.
commotionfever
since you mention Picard and wanting contribute to MusicBrainz. I'm working on a new fast tagger[1] in the spirit of Picard or beets. Just a little different and more scriptable
It makes it's best attempt to match with MusicBrainz, but if there's no match it it offers links to pre-seed MusicBrainz with tools like Harmony
CharlesW
Harmony (https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/) is amazing, and completely changed my relationship with MusicBrainz.
What are you using for tag reading/writing in Go? Robust, complete options are non-existent in JavaScript land (Deno, Bun, Node, etc.), so I ended up creating a Wasm version of TagLib with a TypeScript API.
commotionfever
haha that's funny! I made a WASM TagLib for Go
riedel
I recommend also AudioRanger for resorting and moving stuff into the right places. For ripping I use ExactAudioCopy, which supports also flac.
mikepavone
This is a small point, but calling the 33-byte unit a sector in CDDA is a bit misleading and probably incorrect for the quantity being labeled. This is a channel data frame and contains 24-bytes of audio data, 1 byte of subcode data (except for the channel data frames that have sync symbols instead) and the rest is error correction. This is the smallest grouping of data in CDDA, but it's not really an individually addressable unit.
98 of these channel data frames make up a timecode frame which represents 1/75th of a second of audio and has 2352 audio data bytes, 96 subcode bytes (2 frames have sync codes instead) with the remainder being sync and error correction. Timecode frames are addressable (via the timecodes embedded in the subcode data) and are the unit referred to in the TOC. This is probably what's being called a sector here. Notably, a CD-ROM sector corresponds 1:1 with a timecode frame.
Note: Red book actually just confusingly calls both of these things frames and does not use the terms "channel data frame" or "timecode frame"
Lammy
I used to do the MusicBrainz thing with Picard and later with Beets, but I got sick of Somebody Else's Metadata because of MusicBrainz's (former?) policy where everything must be Title Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve. I prefer my tags to match the artist's choice, because I consider it a tonal indicator that helps set the mood for the work.
It seems like they might not enforce that any more since the album I was going to pick on as an example is now tagged like I have it, although I also have lower-case “my bloody valentine” Artist tags on every track with Title Cased “My Bloody Valentime” Album-Artist tag for browsing in Navidrome: https://musicbrainz.org/release/1e4c282b-8b0d-4d20-9f74-175f...
…but I already got out of the habit and will still just keep typing them out myself :)
I also always include the catalog number in the Comment field and in brackets in my folder names to separate different releases of supposedly the same thing. Good example of why you would want to do this is the 2004 vs the 2007 releases of MM..FOOD? where the last track (Kookies) had to be redone to remove the Sesame Street samples:
- 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_XcL4nYos
- 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYSwvdEfeY
Shout-out to https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ and https://fanart.tv/ for high-quality album art to embed.
qingcharles
As someone responsible for setting the track naming policy originally at a big streaming company, I can't remember what the policy was. I know I would be called in all the time for crazy shit like Aphex Twin having just a page of equations as track names, or I seem to remember some album by Röyksopp that had just colors printed for the track names and no words. That stuff killed me.
Or the team doing all the ingestion being overworked minimum wage high school grads and suddenly an entire semi truck turns up and it's just palettes of CDs completely in many various East Asian languages.
If I had to do it over I would have two fields, one for whatever best represented what the CD says (and as someone below me points out, this was usually the publisher's artistic discretion and differed between the data they sent, the back of the CD, the track list printed on the CD and the liner notes) and I would have a separate field for Title Cased Titles.
tom_
Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 2 had a track listing that was 6 pie charts, one image per slice, 1 slice per track. I assume it came on 3 LPs, but I had the 2 CD version, and there were corresponding pie charts printed on the face up sides of the CDs... as if it made it any clearer.
I ripped them about 15 years ago and cddb came up with track names for them, matching the ones in its Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Ambient_Works_Volume_...). I wonder if we have any evidence that the mapping from tracks to images is remotely correct.
qingcharles
I came up with the first CD DB for Windows 95 just before it came out. I realized Media Player had an .ini file with the track names and so I had people on Usenet send me all their listings and would reintegrate it and publish it frequently for the first few weeks until I realized .ini files had a 64KB limit and that was the end of that.
If I did it again, which I have planned for a long time, I would require citations for every track listing. Sure, it's a big barrier, but it'd nice to get it right where possible. The primary citations would generally be to the album cover, but in cases like the Aphex Twin insanity, cites to things like interviews and label demo releases etc could definitely be valid.
BeFlatXIII
> I know I would be called in all the time for crazy shit like Aphex Twin having just a page of equations as track names, or I seem to remember some album by Röyksopp that had just colors printed for the track names and no words. That stuff killed me.
More creative than a QA department.
JohnFen
> MusicBrainz's (former?) policy where everything must be Title Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve.
Is that why that happens? It was always a baffling thing to me and required manual correction (and is one of the sorts of errors that made MusicBrainz less useful).
pavon
Part of the difficulty is that artists/labels aren't always consistent about the formatting of song titles. Its not uncommon for the capitalization to vary between the back cover of the CD, the printing on the CD itself and the liner notes. And then you have variations between releases of the same CD, and digital releases where the file metadata, and the store listing, and the artist website also all vary. So I can't blame MusicBrainz for choosing to normalize by default. Ideally, you could use normalized case for the Recording and Work song titles, and then stylized for the Release song titles, but most people don't go to that level of detail when entering songs.
JohnFen
Oh, I understand the problem, and I don't blame them either. However, it is a part of why these services stopped being useful to me.
amiga386
> policy where everything must be Title Cased regardless of how it's presented on the CD sleeve
If the music artist decided how it should be on the CD sleeve, and you can show that, then you can go with that. But more often than not, the sleeve is done by the record company's graphic designers, not the music artist.
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Titles
> Album and song titles are often found in upper‐case on the back cover of CDs. For example, the album Songs of Love and Hate is written as “SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE” on the cover. This is usually the choice of a graphic designer, not the artist. So, instead of copying the title from the cover, we follow certain rules to capitalize a title.
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction...
> Error Correction: There are many cases of record companies incorrectly reproducing titles or even artist names, or breaking generally accepted rules of usage for stylistic purposes. In such cases it often makes sense to fix errors and standardize irregularities, valuing correct spelling, punctuation and grammar over faithfulness to the printed release cover.
> Artist Intent: Artists sometimes choose to present names and titles in ways that deliberately contradict the rules of the language they're in (e.g. unorthodox spellings) and/or the MusicBrainz Style Guidelines. To describe the way we handle such choices, we use the term "artist intent." The general idea is that if an artist intended something to be written in a special way, then MusicBrainz should follow that intent. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find out what an artist intended. If you want to claim that some deviation from the Style Guidelines should be considered artist intent, the burden of proof lies on you.
ItsHarper
Seems reasonable. I'd think this should be pretty straightforward for songs new enough to be released online. If it's capitalized a certain way on Spotify, that's almost certainly what the artist intended.
null
Avamander
I can't recall when something like that was enforced. Artistic intent is definitely something that editors and guidelines intend to preserve. Though in some cases it might be hard to determine if something is a mistake or intentional - there are incredibly weird releases.
sandreas
Maybe for archival Purposes you could use `redumper` (https://github.com/superg/redumper) to prevent ripping mistakes.
My personal workflow:
- rip the audio CD via EAC with acousticID (flac)
- retrieve metadata via beets in a script completely automated
- convert flac to mp3 via beets inplace convert (see below)
- backup the flac files to another location
- self-host navidrome and use the substreamer / dsub app and smart playlists to listen "on the go" (The Apple usb-c-to-audiojack adapter is pretty decent)
- transfer this via iTunes VM to my good old iPod Nano 7g as main listening device for audiobooks
https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/
beets convert config:
convert:
auto: no
ffmpeg: /usr/bin/ffmpeg
opts: -codec:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 0 -ac 2 -ar 48000 -map_metadata 0 -movflags use_metadata_tags
max_bitrate: 192
threads: 1maeln
~Why use MP3 instead of opus, vorbis or AAC ? All of them have (most of the time) better compression ratio (and better quality) than MP3. Is it for compatibility reason ?~
edit: Ah, I missed the ipod nano part
sandreas
Just compatibility and "high enough" quality. Works in my car, on my iPod, on my Phone, on my kitchen radio and is the most common format in general.
nani8ot
iPod Nano 7th gen. does support AAC (AIFF & WAV too).
lxgr
All iPods except for the very first and second one have supported AAC out of the box, and I believe there was a firmware update even for the two that didn't. Apple didn't invent the format, but was definitely its biggest proponent from early on.
pflenker
Somewhat related: some conscious artistic choices - such as writing down two tracks but delivering them as one (not sure if this is what happened here) can’t really be transferred into databases.
I own a cd where one track name is a small icon depicting a heart stabbed with a rather lengthy knife. To my knowledge, this track has no canonical name. Any digital version of this cd betrays the respective author‘s interpretation of the icon.
And then, of course, there’s „Love Symbol“: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)
FearNotDaniel
> can’t really be transferred into databases
Of course they can, it's up to the person designing the database schema to anticipate what is a common artistic practice and model the data accordingly. It might be that specific databases like MusicBrainz and Gracenote haven't accounted for that, but if you own the schema you can easily set up a one-to-many (parent/child) relationship between physical track and song name.
One extreme example of this would be the "Lovesexy" album by (the artist formerly known as) Prince, which in its original CD form had only one track, containing 9 songs. I think the Spotify version is still faithful to this.
This and many other common "conscious artistic choices" ought to be collected into a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Recorded Music", if that is not already a thing...
In your example above, yes it's true that many song titles and artist names are fully and partially graphic symbols with no direct text representation (another thing Prince was fond of), but again given the prevalence of this there's no reason a smart data schema couldn't model a song or artist having a 'canonical' name that can only be represented by some graphic format along with one or more pronounceable/text-encodable alternatives (TAFKAP/Love Symbol) and so on; and of course tracking the fact that the 'preferred' identifier can change over time (Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, to mention a non-Prince example).
omoikane
The person designing the database schema might have made a conscious decision not to support arbitrary track names and layout, since the added restrictions will make the client side software easier to implement.
But I guess it is also possible to design a schema that includes a lot of optional metadata, and clients only need to support up to certain core set of features if they choose.
pflenker
It’s entirely possible to come up with artistic choices which precisely aim to be impossible to capture. So at times it’s not due to falsehoods someone believes, but rather the opposite - artists deliberately breaking the limits of what’s currently possible. Not a direct CD example, but one vinyl (was it by Pink Floyd?) has a special last track, where the needle is redirected endlessly, making the last track effectively endless. Or double grooved vinyls, Track 0s on CDs and so on.
But to stay with my example of the stabbed heart - even if the DB supported it, you’d still have to make choices when converting the icon as printed into the database, such as coloring.
indrora
How about "Naming the CDs"
There's a handful of albums that MusicBrainz doesn't quite have the right cd naming for since one was labeled "LEFT" and the other "RIGHT" and not 1/2 -- there is no canonical 1/2 order.
null
kevin_thibedeau
There's always going to be outliers but I find MusicBrainz pretty useful. I note that a lot of CD-text has poor application of title capitalization and MB usually has it in a more rational form. My ripping system presents a choice when both are available and I usually pick MB. There's also the benefit that the MB database is Unicode and CD-text is whatever the authoring tool used which is usually CP1252 but sometimes not.
Asmod4n
CD Text is a thing, sadly no major label is using it anymore to embed metadata into their records so such a thing like MusicBrainz wouldn't be needed.
Sony was a big supporter of it ~25 years ago.
trentnix
For the younger crowd: fancy head units (that's what we called the essential aftermarket CD player/receiver in the dash of your vehicle) would show you CD Text with artist, album, and track name. It would melt the brains of your friends when the name of the song that was playing would scroll by on an old-school, single- or multi-line LCD display. It was a massive flex in its day.
Good times...
ssl-3
Amusingly, my 13-year-old Honda does that -- even though it doesn't have CD Text support.
The factory stereo has a recent copy of Gracenote's CDDB built-in.
It also automagically rips and compresses Red Book CDs to to internal storage.
And it is smart enough to play a CD seemingly like regular -- with random track access and such -- while concurrently [and rather quickly] ripping the entire disc.
It's mobilized piracy at the most invisible form.
But yeah: CD Text is/was neat, at least in concept. I never got a chance to use it; none of my audio hardware ever supported it. (Supposedly, it also supported song lyrics.)
badc0ffee
My 2006 Toyota had that. What I really wanted was an aux port, or even a cassette deck I could use with an adapter to plug in my iPod. Instead I had to make do with a FM transmitter plugged into the cigarette lighter.
rhinoceraptor
My 2017 Focus ST still has a CD player with CD text, and I actually do listen to music on CD in it, the bluetooth quality is noticeably worse for whatever reason. I got my first iPod in about 2007 in middle school, and I only ever had about 10-20 CDs growing up, but I started getting into CDs about a year ago. It seems like there is a minor resurgence now that vinyl is expensive, since CDs still cost the same as they ever did, and a lot of them are cheaper even without inflation. I picked up a copy of Pretty Hate Machine at a Walmart for $8 the other day.
lxgr
I don't think I've ever had a CD and a player that supported it, unfortunately. A real shame, especially on car radios with 10 disk magazines in the trunk, where the CD case was unlikely to be around.
CDDA barely feels like a digital format: Sure, there's PCM audio on them, but error detection is dubious at best – it doesn't cover any sub-channels to my knowledge, and it's done by the same low-level layers as error correction, so I believe there's a chance for mistaking a garbled-but recoverable frame for a broke one.
asciimov
Of course Sony was, because they own the patent for it.
The reason other labels, and most cd units, don’t use CD-Text is companies don’t want to pay for the license.
dylan604
[flagged]
Henchman21
When I was building out infrastructure to support streaming at Sony Music Entertainment, it was well known that interns would input the metadata. Typos were rife and genres? Made up out of whole cloth.
It feels safe to assume that the situation has improved since then, but I doubt seriously we’ll ever be free of typos ;)
JohnFen
> genres? Made up out of whole cloth.
The problem with genre remains entirely unsolved across the board. The solution I use in my collection is to do what everyone else seems to do: make them up out of whole cloth. Because I'm the only one making them up, it means my labeling is at least internally consistent.
TylerE
The biggest issue with genres is most databases treating them as one to one rather than one to many.
JohnFen
That's a real issue. I think the biggest issue with genre, though, is that even if people agree on a list of possible genre labels, there is often disagreement about what music belongs in which genre.
This isn't a new problem at all. Even music labels often disagree. Back when record stores were a thing, it was pretty common for different stores to categorize the same albums differently in terms of genre. I think the only way to avoid it is to stick to very, very broad categories. "Rock", for instance, covers an amazingly broad set of styles.
Henchman21
I will admit that I do precisely the same with my collection! But I truly felt that those interns should’ve received a list to choose from, not an open text field.
lloydatkinson
It's sad Sony put the effort into writing rootkits for music CD's but did nothing to automate, flag, fix typos for metadata...
mxuribe
I remember the Sony rootkits...Since then and to this day, i avoid buying anything related to Sony as best i can. Funny thing is, folks who know me know that i am not the kind of person who holds a grudge....but something about that rootkit event really brought the ire in me....one of the extremely few times where i held a grudge. So, i avoid Sony and go on with my life.
I also stop buying at other companies...but for other companies for some reason i don;'t hold onto the ire...i just stop buying from them, and quietly move on...but Sony....i don't get it, but the dislike is crazy.
Henchman21
I recall a meeting where my team was asked to do some technical legwork for the implementation. To his credit, my boss stood up, said some words about ethics, and led our team out the door. It wasn’t the entire org… just the music business folks as I recall. I left shortly thereafter.
Henchman21
Agreed. I could say tons here, but it’ll suffice to say that I am wildly happy I no longer work there!
lxgr
> Aside from some audio tracks and a table of contents over those tracks, very little extra information is included on a disk - you've pretty much only got the artist name, album name and track names actually burned into the disk.
Is that so? Was that introduced very late in the life of CDs, or why was CDDB a thing then?
piperswe
> Edits on MusicBrainz spend 7 days in limbo after they're created
Not all edits, just major ones (e.g. name changes). Minor edits usually get auto-accepted.
Avamander
Faster if someone votes on the edit, which you can request on their IRC/Discord/Discourse if there's a need (like larger or dependant edits).
amiga386
And just so people know, their edits were applied in March this year...
Edit #122458416 - Edit medium Vote tally: 0 yes : 0 no Status: Applied Opened: 2025-02-24 00:02 UTC Closed: 2025-03-03 01:00 UTC For quicker closing: 3 unanimous votes If no votes cast: Accept upon closing
infl8ed
Actually, and quite interestingly, it looks like their second edit (to separate the tracks) failed: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458694 Status: Failed dependency This edit failed either because an entity it was modifying no longer exists, or the entity can not be modified in this manner anymore.
Clicking through to the CD release we can see that it indeed still has those two tracks combined https://musicbrainz.org/release/af4dc096-65d2-4cc5-9e0c-176d...
amiga386
It did fail, because as you see, that edit's track 5 says "Rainclous" ... but https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458416 was in play to change that to "Raincloud"... so https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122458694 failed because two edits wanted to change the same medium at the same time.
They got the change made later in https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122791893
egypturnash
Damn, MusicBrainz is still running?
"MusicBrainz is operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a California based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping MusicBrainz free and open source." - the gloriously retro-looking front page
piperswe
Still running and still doing great! Some of us still curate a local music library instead of streaming ;)
egypturnash
I curate my own library too but it's pretty much all off of Bandcamp. I don't even own a CD drive I could rip with any more.
pavon
Even with digital releases, MusicBrainz often has more detailed metadata than the original files. And if you have a mixed library of rips and digital purchases, it is nice to use a tagger like Picard to enforce consistent directory structure and filenaming.
masklinn
You can curate a music library without ripping CDs tho.
JohnFen
Depends on your musical tastes. A good 25% of the music in my library is not available in any form other than used CDs.
ssl-3
I can curate my own library of bookmarks within [some other body's music library] without CDs; of course I can.
I can do that with iTunes or Spotify or Tidal or Amazon Music or whatever else.
But none of these bookmarks are necessarily related to my music. They are only just bookmarks that refer to music that might exist within the libraries that these bodies provide.
And while all of these libraries are certainly quite vast, there's a fuckton of (published!) music that these commercial libraries do not provide.
ZeroGravitas
MusicBrainz has (or at least had) an acoustic fingerprint system for processing audio files too.
piperswe
Indeed! About half of my new music acquisition is on CD, the other half is Bandcamp/Qobuz/7Digital.
OkayPhysicist
Seeing a Mastodon link on a clearly hand-written HTML site is neat.
cloud8421
I use MusicBrainz and donate every month - yeah data is not perfect, but you can go and fix it yourself if needed, and the UI is extremely functional without any frills.
A maintain my own digital music collection. The only two tools I use for maintaining the CD portion of my collection are k3b and MusicBrainz Picard. k3b can rip to flac and it will on embed metadata present on the CD itself. Then after I rip it, I add it to Picard.
I use the "lookup CD" feature in Picard, which gives me a selection of releases to choose from. Among the choices, I usually see a release matching the catalog number on my CD's case. When I don't see a matching release, I will typically add the disc ID to an existing release, or I will create a new release, or sometimes even creating a new release + new release group and add the necessary metadata to MusicBrainz.
I haven't tried any automatic tagging process like the ripping program the article talks about does, mostly because I want to use Picard to make sure the metadata is correct or contribute to MusicBrainz if it isn't.
I like MusicBrainz a lot because applications like Plex use it very well to group release groups together and will (usually) deduplicate identical recordings so that identical tracks can share a rating. It's a really great database and is kept up to date pretty well.