Car infotainment systems are pretty fancy these days, full of information that helps us go about our lives. Their databases contain maps of entire countries and lists of everything from hospitals to charging stations to restaurants. But there’s another database that may be lurking in your car that you’ve never thought about; indeed, you probably never even knew it existed. Today, I’m going to tell you about this obscure database, which is almost entirely pointless, and I’ll even educate you on how to update it. Indeed, yours is probably well out of date!
If you’re driving a car from the last couple of decades, there’s a fair chance that it’s able to tell you what song you’re listening to, whether it’s from the radio, a CD, or even playing from a USB drive or your smartphone. We recently covered how radio stations transmit data on the currently playing song, but what about those other sound sources? Thankfully for all of us, a company called Gracenote found a solution to this problem.
Gracenote stemmed from an earlier open-source project called CDDB, which spawned in 1993 and worked with a computer application called xmcd. xmcd was a piece of software that would let users play audio CDs on their computer. xmcd was built to work with CDDB, which stood for Compact Disc Database. When playing a disc, xmcd would read the “Table of Contents” (TOC) on an audio CD. This had no metadata on the artist, album name, or track names; it simply laid out the number of tracks, their lengths, and where they began on the disc. The vast majority of CDs had a unique TOC, however. Thus, xmcd could use the TOC as a fingerprint to search the CDDB database, which would return track and artist names for the CD. Users were able to submit data for discs unknown to the database, building it into a rich resource over several years.
CDDB was later commercialized, becoming CDDB LLC in 1998. It was eventually bought out and became known as Gracenote. As the digital music revolution was taking off, Gracenote’s ability to provide media metadata to users was of great value to many companies. As CDs grew more and more irrelevant, the company also developed a technique of “acoustic fingerprinting.” Rather than determining a CD via its track layout, this used an algorithm that could generate “fingerprints” for individual songs. The company initially relied on its MusicID system which implemented the Philips algorithm, which creates fingerprints based on the energy content of various frequency bands in a song. It later developed other algorithms for fingerprinting, too. It’s the same kind of technology used by Shazam for identifying a song from a few seconds of audio.
The system as implemented in vehicles is fairly straightforward. A stream of audio playing on the infotainment system is run through Gracenote’s fingerprint algorithm. The fingerprint generated is then compared with the Gracenote database to identify the song. Metadata on the artist name, track name, and so on, can then be displayed on the infotainment screen. This method works on any audio source, whether from CD, auxiliary port, or a USB stick full of MP3 files. Indeed, it can work on radio sources, too, though some automakers don’t bother, preferring to display data from the Radio Data System in those cases instead.
Naturally, it’s entirely possible to query the Gracenote database over the Internet. However, for a car, that would require an active cellular data connection. That’s only become common in recent years, and not every owner chooses to sign up for connectivity services. As an alternative, Gracenote has instead allowed automakers to locally store a Gracenote database in a vehicle’s infotainment system. This is stored on flash storage or hard drive built into the car’s infotainment system. The car can then query the database at will whenever necessary.
It sounds like a frivolous feature, right? Who cares if the infotainment displays song title and artist data when playing a CD? But here’s the thing. In the late 2000s, some automakers started letting users rip entire CDs in their cars, storing the music on the infotainment system so it could be played later. This meant that you didn’t need to drive around with lots of CDs or use a CD changer. Of course, such a system is unworkable if you don’t have artist and track information for your ripped music. Otherwise, how will you know what’s what? Gracenote’s database was the solution to this otherwise intractable problem. After all, it’s hard to imagine owners sitting in their car for hours, typing in tons of track names on a dodgy scroll wheel or touchscreen interface.
The problem with this local database concept is that it’s frozen in time. The system works great if you buy a new car in 2010 and only ever listen to music up to 2009 or so. But let’s say you have that car for a year or two. You get big into Portugal, The Man, and you buy In The Mountain, In The Cloud in 2011. Or maybe you jump on the rise Taylor Swift in the Red era (that’s 2012). Well, you’re out of luck. Those discs came out after your car’s Gracenote database was made, and so it has no idea what those songs are.
The solution to this problem is obvious. The car’s Gracenote database must be updated regularly! But how? Well, it varies. In an ideal world, it would be something simple that dealers did at regular service intervals, though I haven’t found much evidence suggesting that was ever the case. In fact, most automakers leave it up to owners to update Gracenote if and when they feel like it.
Update procedures vary between automakers and between generations of infotainment system. Often, quite drastically. Most commonly, infotainment systems are set up to allow Gracenote updates via USB drive. For example, Mazda and Toyota both support this function for some of their duly equipped models, both publishing their latest updates in 2022. Mitsubishi allows user downloads, but it’s performed via burning a CD, with the latest update circa 2017. This involves downloading an update file, putting it on a USB stick, and plugging it into the right port in the car. From there, it’s usually as simple as selecting a menu item in the infotainment system’s settings to perform the update.
Of course, when a simple procedure can be needlessly complicated and put in the hands of dealership technicians instead, sirens start going off at BMW HQ. In cars using the CIC infotainment system, BMW hid Gracenote updates behind a secret service menu. The updated database itself was delivered to the vehicle via an officially issued DVD handed out to dealerships. It’s largely the same process BWM used to send out navigation system updates. However, the Gracenote updates were issued separately on their own media. In my research, I actually found some users sharing torrent files for Gracenote update DVDs allowing owners to perform their own updates at home.
Thankfully for BMW owners, later models got with the times. Newer cars with online connectivity allowed querying the online Gracenote database, though it wasn’t always a perfectly functional system.
For a laugh, I contacted a few dealerships to see if any could update my BMW’s Gracenote database, though none responded at the time of writing. I also reached out to Andrea Petersen, who works as an independent service advisor. “We have not performed this update on any vehicles according to our history or the techs,” Petersen told me. I suspected it was something that was almost never done in the wild, but I’d love to have chatted with more dealer techs to get a better picture.
Indeed, through researching this piece, I’ve continually been amazed at how many people had even heard of the feature. To me, I figured it was so obscure it would have been almost never used. And yet, almost every automaker seems to have used it at some point. Meanwhile, there are hundreds or thousands of forum posts of people talking about it! Everywhere I looked, people were giving a shit about Gracenote!
Not everybody loves it, though. Hilariously, sometimes when an update fails partway through, it corrupts Gracenote on the infotainment system. This is great if you hate the feature, but it’s very annoying if you enjoy it. Indeed, some people chose to disable Gracenote because in some cars, the system would ignore perfectly valid ID3 tags on MP3 files and guess incorrect song titles via the Gracenote database instead.
So, let’s imagine a worst case scenario. You’ve ripped a bunch of new music to your car, and none of it was in the vehicle’s onboard Gracenote database. You’ve got hundreds of tracks all named “Track 1” and “Track 2” and so on. So what do you do?
Well, there was a hilariously manual fix for this issue. By my research, Infiniti offered this, and Nissan, via their Music Box infotainment systems. I’ve not seen it from any other automaker. You could do a small personal update to your car’s Gracenote database in some models. As seen on Infiniti’s website back in 2014, you could use a special infotainment menu item to dump details of all your tracks with missing names to a CompactFlash card or USB drive depending on your vehicle. The storage device could then be plugged into a PC running a Gracenote app, which would query the online Gracenote database and populate the song titles. The storage device could then be placed back in the vehicle to update the database with the specific data for those tracks. Oh, and it was PC only. If you were a Mac user, well, you were out of luck.
Other automakers may have offered similar tools, but I grew short on leads to support this theory. Automakers tend to wipe old tools and details about earlier infotainment systems from their websites pretty regularly. When you’re looking for details on tech that’s over five years old, sometimes you have to rely on forums and then bounce yourself over to the Wayback Machine like I did here.
It bears noting that Gracenote didn’t just stick to audio fingerprinting, either. The company did a lot of work in making cars and music play nicely together. It all goes back to when cars started coming out with voice recognition in the 2000s. The idea was that you could tell your car what song you wanted to listen to. For that to work, it needed accurate metadata for those tracks. Gracenote actually developed a technology it called MediaVOCS to help in this area. It was charged with taking in voice input like “Play AC DC” and figuring out that meant the songs on your iPod that were tagged “AC/DC” or “AC-DC.” It could even handle nicknames like “Snoop” for Snoop Dogg or “CCR” for Credence Clearwater Revival. Somehow, though, one suspects this would be limited to mainstream international acts. I’d love to try out a car with MediaVOCS and see if it could correlate “Dunies” to Dune Rats or “Sizzle Grizzle” to Sincerely, Grizzly, but I suspect not.
Gracenote wasn’t just limited to filling in artist and song names, either. In some cases, the Gracenote metadata included information on song genres or similarities between bands. It opened up the possibility for auto-generated playlists right within the infotainment system itself. The company boasted of this functionality all the way back in 2011, allowing songs to be grouped by genre, era, or place of origin. Of course, one suspects the auto-generated “80s” playlist to be more accurate than a request that your car play you the greatest hits out of Phoenix, Arizona. It all comes down to what songs have what metadata, after all. I’d love to test it myself one day. Sure, you’d expect it to play The Beatles when you ask for the sound of Liverpool, England. But will it play you American Football if you ask for hot tracks from Illinois?
Researching this piece, I’ve honestly been blown away by how cool Gracenote’s tech is. I realize now I’ve never heard of it because I’ve been driving 20-year-old beaters my whole life like a true Autopian. If anything, it’s been a wakeup call that there is always more to learn about cars. In this case, I’d missed something that was hiding out in the open. Gracenote’s figures suggest the tech is in 250 million cars, and 36.7% of new cars sold today. I’d actually heard about Gracenote in the ’90s, and CDDB, and used it on my computer. But until last week, I had no idea it was in cars!
So, now that you’re well-educated on the matter, you’ve got no excuse. Jump online, or head to a dealer, and update your damn Gracenote database already! Chances are it’s a decade out of date, or more. What if you’re on a date, and they want to pop in their new copy of Kid Cudi’s Insano on CD? Well, it’s highly unlikely you’ll find a 2024 Gracenote update for your car, but you’ll probably be safe if they pop on Travis Scott’s ASTROWORLD from 2018. And won’t that be something!
Image credits: BMW, Nissan, Chrysler, Mazda, Ford
I sometimes play MP3s off of a USB drive and I hate GraceNote. All the info is in the tags, so why does Gracenote override that and give me the wrong artist name? I don’t want to update it, I want to disable it. I already have this information.
Since I seem to change head units in my car every few years…I’m fairly sure my Gracenote database is fairly up to date.
Now I’m curious about two things: 1) Would my 2001 and 2007 cars recognize a CD purchased after those years and 2) Did I purchase any CDs after 2007? I’ve been digital-only for music for a loooong time.
You should definitely check and report back!
My 2001 plays every CD I have bought from the Columbia Record and tape store. So you should be fine.
Technically a CD is digital too :p
I’m too old for this shit!
(thanks to Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon)
My car’s music database in on my cell phone.
Same. 13,000+ tracks, mostly ripped from a sizable CD collection.
Here is my old man think. Most people commute less than an hour to work, shopping etc. Now you haven over 13,000 tracks/songs at say 2 minutes play time. So 26,000 minutes means 52,000 trips. Say 10 trips a day, you have 5,200 days of saved music. Now if you are actually able to find the music you want today among everything else can you find it before the trip is over? Will you still like the music when you listen to it is the next 20 years? Will you add anything new making it longer? Can’t we all agree more than a dozen cds that fit on a CD holder is enough to cover a regular 30 minute trip?
It’s like Google bragging that on a search you did they have 30,000 hits. Are you going to look at 30,000? Frankly give me the top 10 relevant hits. But then they can’t stuff advertising down tlyour throat.
I only have 1700 tracks. Local trips it is the radio. I save the phone music for road trips and they sound better and are cheaper than Serius/MX.
I’m not even going to pretend I’m a normal music consumer. If nothing else, having all the music files on the phone is acting more as a backup than anything else.
Having said that, I have several playlists with hundreds of songs each. Different genres, different eras. But when it comes down to it, there’s only about 3000 songs in the collection that get played semi-regular. I don’t even commute anymore, I am full-time work from home. However I do drive a lot still because I enjoy it.
But I do hate advertising, I haven’t listened to terrestrial radio on a regular basis in ages. Having my tunes locally stored also bypasses the issues of sketchy data coverage which my nephew who streams does run into occasionally.
I replaced the AM radio in my SAAB 96 with an AIFAB Gemini rally tripmeter but I’m pretty sure it still knows at least as much about today’s music as I do anyway:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53489374195_03f6d17eb4_c.jpg
I’ve never gotten Gracenote to work correctly. Every single time it’ll do something weird, like marking Skindred – Kill The Power as World music of all things or not recognizing the embedded metadata so that Gerry Mulligan – Night Of The Festival appears without any information and just appears as “Track 783”. The updates aren’t a problem for me, because the software is buggy and slow to begin with.
When an MP3 player I’ve had since 2006 is faster at updating it’s database and searching songs, you know you screwed up. Those things had to run on assembly and Java for god’s sake.
I knew about it, but it never worked. And the latest available database is from 2015. So, I will stick with the MP3s and their wonderful ID3 tags.
Oh good. So your car stereo shares something in common with your TV’s STB (if you’re not a cord cutter). Gracenote.
At least the STB is self-updating.
So, like me, my car can recognize quite a bit of music up until a certain era, after which it just doesn’t even try.
Ha!
ACDC
AC DC
AC-DC
AC/DC
This shit used to haunt me. Stuff like Kazaa where people would use cute symbols or shorthand to spice up their own tracklist without regard to the integrity of a global database (AC TILDE DC?!) was infuriating. I’m glad we’ve got it all figured out now and everything is always correct!
Oh the hours I’ve spent on this. I hadn’t realized the joy I’ve had in decade or so since I heard the term “ID3 tag”
People actually upload music/data about music into their car? This is the problem. Cars aren’t and shouldn’t be computers. They HAVE computers to operate, but they should not be the primary device to compute for things that aren’t required for driving. That’s product scope creep and it shows with how bad infotainment has been the last 15 years.
Machines can do more than one thing at a time.
Can and should are two different things.
Congratulations, on a website full of crumegons hating tech in cars, you have written the most clueless, old-man-yells-at-cloud comment of them all.
Cars shouldn’t ID songs? What? It doesn’t take away from the ability to make the car function. The radio is the most important part of the car for a lot of people.
When did I say radio? RDS works well BECAUSE it’s not something cooked up by an OEM. I said cars shouldn’t be computers housing data that is not essential to its functionality. RDS comes from the station and is simply displayed, not stored. We all carry computer that are vastly superior at computing than some half baked, already out of date, hardware/software an OEM will use.
It’s rich how you spelled curmudgeon wrong while trying to tell me my opinion is stupid. How valid is your opinion on automotive computing if you can’t even use a computer correctly to validate your spelling?
I can’t tell what the hell you are complaining about. You seem to be implying this capability somehow takes away from the core functionality of the car. It absolutely does not. The tech is older than smartphones, so I don’t see how that’s relevant.
Nothing says “I don’t have a good argument” like calling out the other person’s spelling. Amazing how you sound like an old fart uspet cars do new things and at the same time a 14 year old trying to sound impressive on the internet.
Just because you don’t understand product scope creep and the impact it has on overall product quality doesn’t mean you get to call me names. This topic is obviously over your head. Go look it up yourself, just turn on spell check.
Project scope creep isn’t relevant when the project is making an entrainment system. They didn’t pull people off designing the brakes to make gracenote. Having the screen show what song you are playing on a CD is not scope creep, thats a primary feature of the radio. (In case you weren’t aware, radio often refers to the unit that play music in a car, even if it isn’t actually from a radio station) There is a whole shitload of stuff in a car that is frivolous and little to do with being a car, this one is far from the worst.
Yes, I specifically used PRODUCT scope creep (it’s rich you seem to think I made a mistake but also bitched about being called out on your previous god awful spelling error, but now are doing what you complained about, hypocrite) because it is different from PROJECT scope creep. The scope of the product now includes being a database for music metadata, that has nothing to do with the project, this happens BEFORE the project starts, and everything to do with product requirements creeping. That took time and money away from other areas of the vehicle whether you think so or not. They have a target price, they add features, something else has to give.
This hits me right in the nostalgia. I was an early and frequent contributor to CDDB, and thought it was such cool tech back in the day (it still is, TBH).
My current vehicles, a ‘23 Ram 2500 and a ‘21 VW Tiguan, don’t even have CD players anymore. Neither did our previous several. I think the last vehicle I bought that had the ability to play a CD was my ‘16 Wrangler.
And now for a contrarian view. My life, both personally and professionally, is hectic and noisy beyond belief. The only chance I get to spend time in blessed solitude with my own thoughts is when I’m alone in my car on my daily commute. Silence is golden. I’ve had my car for several years and aside from maybe a few days of seasonal music before Christmas the radio has never been on. There is just me, the GPS lady and my solitary thoughts in blissful silence. The other 22 hours I’ll listen to whatever you’ve go – just not in my car.
OMG, I can’t agree more!!!!!
Wow, I only realized this a few months ago myself. My new commute (for the past ~16months) is MUCH longer than my previous commute. I crush 21 highway miles each way. I rarely play the radio anymore. This is my thinking time. I have no GPS lady, either.
Just me listening to my car.
For me it’s not the silence, but my car is the one place I don’t have to stare at a screen. I like my analog dash. I get in cars with big screens and just feel like I’m at work.
“But let’s say you have that car for a year or two. You get big into Portugal, The Man, and you buy In The Mountain, In The Cloud in 2011. Or maybe you jump on the rise Taylor Swift in the Red era (that’s 2012). Well, you’re out of luck. Those discs came out after your car’s Gracenote database was made, and so it has no idea what those songs are”
Neither do I so it’s not just Gracenote. The only name I recognize is Taylor Swift and that’s only because its annoyingly crammed into my eyeballs by its omnipresence. Thanks to my own library of almost exclusively 20th century music I don’t think I’d recognize a single song of hers if I heard it in an elevator and definitely none of the others.
A good signal that you are getting old is when the members of your favorite bands start to die from natural causes and not overdose.
So I try to update frequently. Portugal. the man have some nice songs.
I was in a store the other day and they were playing (yes I had to look this up) Tik Tok by Kesha. I was mildly shocked at the lines:
“And now the dudes are linin’ up ’cause they hear we got swagger
But we kick ’em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger”
Had that been some brassy dude singing lyrics about how he and his wing men blow off chicks they consider unattractive I imagine the station would have been swamped with angry listeners.
Moe shocking was the “looks like Mick Jagger” part. Really Kesha? You were born in 1987. Mick Jagger was born in 1943. Mick Jagger is old enough to be your grandpa.
It seems to be a very conflicting music. An almost 40 singer trying to reach youth with a song called TikTok and talking about Mick Jagger, which young people have zero idea about the existence.
I will look for it in Spotify just because I got curious.
“It seems to be a very conflicting music. An almost 40 singer trying to reach youth with a song called TikTok and talking about Mick Jagger, which young people have zero idea about the existence.”
Tik Tok was recorded in 2009 making Kesha 22 or so at the time. Again I looked it up, I had never heard of this person till yesterday. No surprise, I’m very much NOT the target demographic.
Mick Jagger OTOH would have been 66. So yeah, kinda weird and creepy.
“I will look for it in Spotify just because I got curious”
Go ahead but I will warn you, it’s grating to anyone old enough to know firsthand who Mick Jagger is.
Portugal, The Man slaps, you should check them out.
My ex-wife and I bought a loaded 2008 Dodge Avenger R/T new. Total POS of a vehicle, but it had Gracenote in it and I updated it regularly because I still listened to CDs back then, and the Avenger’s radio would rip CDs onto an internal hard drive.
I feel like this feature is kind of pointless now that I listen to precisely zero CDs and use Android Auto in all my vehicles, but it was a really cool feature at the time.
“But will it play you American Football if you ask for hot tracks from Illinois?”
https://youtu.be/ooT_uz–O2A?si=sdB2DLBxMP__VA9c
Oh, wait, is this not what you meant?
If Gracenote doesn’t have that, I will demand the dealer uninstall the whole database
Great article. There was a lot of controversy when CDDB sold to Gracenote. The original CDDB used information populated by users. Basically, in the beginning, if you had a CD that wasn’t in the database, you input the info yourself. It was saved locally and shared with CDDB. This is how the database was initially populated, by individual users. I saw it as an even exchange, use the database and put info in when needed. My memory is a little fuzzy about the actual sale, but a lot of people were upset that the contributors got nothing in return for their contributions and it was believed CDDB did very well in the deal.
I do remember using CDDB when ripping CDs. Uploaded at least 20 CDs information, probably more. There was also musicmatch (something like this) that I used later.
It was a lot of work if you listened to fairly obscure bands.
Not obscure, just not international known.
what’s still stuck in my craw is that gracenote shut down noncommercial access. So the average user trying to rip their personal CDs was out of luck until ripping apps started integrating other data sources like discogs or amazon.
Yeah, that aspect was pretty crappy. My guess is that Gracenote saw profit beyond the user base at the time and figured losing that group wasn’t going to hurt profits. It looks like they were right… Good way to start off on the wrong foot though. Music preference is very personal for many and messing with a rabid music fan can be a bad idea.
I don’t drive anything new enough for this to be a problem.
In fact Mazda just released an updated version this month
GRACENOTE DATABASE UPDATE | MAZDA CONNECT
The completely unnecessary genre names and images are my favorite infotainment feature.
Yeah, when I play podcasts over bluetooth in my car, it shows the most random images. I assume it’s from this system.
But I find it funny that the Motorcycle and Misfits podcast comes up as a dance on my 2015 Verano
Wow, interesting read! I probably have it in my car, too (2011 Ford S-Max). For the fun of it, I could go to my dealership and ask for an update. I might as well ask them for a bottle of blinker fluid, though.
This pretty much feeds into my feelings about EVs. I’m not one to say that EVs aren’t going to be the future (which is more hybrid than EV in the near future) but the example of updating Gracenote is an illustration of what could be the future of EVs. EVs are more phone than car, in a way.
Put it this way. I have a 2012 vehicle. I can still update and repair and whatnot. Do you still have your 2012 phone? If so it will probably work, but won’t do what new ones do and god forbid you need an update. Tons of readers/posters on this site have older cars not to mention Torch, DT, Adrian and other writers. It’s possible to use old tech *cough Apple IIe cough* but it’s not easy. What’s going to happen to all those EVs rolling off the line in 20 years? 30? I can get parts for a 1970 VW Beetle, will that happen in the future or will it be ‘oh sorry, we’re not supporting the older models, here’s a new one for $$$.’
Yeah, I’m an old man yelling at clouds. I know.
And as another old man, I don’t need to update my database, as I tend to listen to old music anyway. But this is still a great article and I would be very interested to see what automakers actually allow for updating besides the few mentioned here.
I’m not an Apple guy, but when they were caught bricking older models (5 or 6, I think), I took notice. Then, automobile manufacturers got in on the software paywalls, restricting features built into the vehicle unless you pay up. Everyone wants the subscription model because you enter your credit card to start and blindly pay every month. Will manufacturers brick old model EVs in the future (assuming the batteries hold up)? Is driving a car just a service I’m paying for until it’s depreciated/obsolete, then my access is revoked?
Don’t underestimate the doggedness of software nerds. Someone somewhere will jail break cars and let you upload custom firmware onto them. Some Teslas have already been done.
Welcome to the software defined car era.
And honestly, it doesn’t affect only EVs, but agree the effects on them will be more noticiable.
Nowadays, everything in car is buried under code signed modules and computers, running under their own network.
Sure, there will be efforts to crack this, but there very few people with the knowledge and will to do it.
What’s worse is that a lot of this stuff is designed on FOSS tools and libraries, and the manufacturers explicitly break the licensing terms to use them. Almost everybody does. They get away with it because a lot of the maintainers don’t have the money and energy to pursuit license breaches against some of the largest corporations in the world. If they were forced to adhere to the licenses then nearly every single system would be accessible because the infotainment system is connected to so many of the car’s core digital systems.
If you can’t break into, it is hard to prove that it broke the license. And probably, in most cases, they use it in the “right” way.
But I think, at least for somethings, we should have an open standard, that all automakers would need to use.
Or at least, publish the source or something similar once the product reach EOL and they will not support it anymore. But there is a long road ahead in the right to repair field.
I’m not old, and fear the same thing you do. I’ve concluded that the 90s was peak automotive engineering in terms of improved technology making a car more functional. Most of my experiences with newer cars have been met with frustration in electrical or software stuff, except for the 2013 Mini I had, that was a very well baked product. I’m not a technology phone, I’m a mechanical engineer that works with computers every day.
Holy cow, what a mess. My cars can read a USB stick or SD card with my MP3s. I place the music in folders. Top level artist name. Next level album name. Then trackname.mp3. It just works.
This is the way.