Help / CD ripping

The disc was not identified, or the wrong edition matched

You put a CD in the drive and either the album details never arrived, or they describe a different pressing to the one in your hand. Identifying a disc and ripping it are separate steps, so an identification problem never blocks the read itself.

The short answer

Several editions matched? Open the Release match list and choose the right one before you press Rip CD.
Nothing matched? Type an artist or an album into the boxes below the disc ID, press Search MusicBrainz, then click the release that fits.
Already ripped it with the wrong details? The audio files are untouched by any of this. Fix the tags in the Tag Editor.

How a disc gets identified

Open Tools and choose Vesari RipCore. There is no Read button: the page checks the drive every couple of seconds and loads a disc shortly after you insert one. The status line moves from Watching for a disc… to Identifying disc… to Disc loaded.

What gets looked up is not the music, it is the disc's table of contents: how many tracks there are and where each one starts. That shape becomes a disc ID, which goes to MusicBrainz. A second, independent lookup asks the CueTools database about the same layout, and reports on the disc identity line as a confidence figure - the number of rips it holds of the most-submitted image of a disc with that layout - alongside how many distinct images it has on file.

The lookup keys on layout, not on sound. That is why two pressings of one album can be told apart, and why two discs sharing a layout get confused.

More than one edition matched

MusicBrainz often holds several releases behind one layout: an original, a remaster, a regional pressing. When it returns more than one, a Release match picker appears, each candidate showing its artist, title, year and country.

Pick the right one before you rip, because the choice is not reversible afterwards. Whatever is selected when you press Rip CD is the release the tags are written from, and it also drives the pairing behind Upgrade (rip & replace), which quarantines your existing copies. Changing the picker later does nothing to files that rip already produced.

One caveat: the Already in your library verdict above the picker is worked out once, from the first candidate, and does not recalculate when you pick another. Read it as a statement about the album rather than the exact pressing.

Nothing matched

Two messages can appear here, and they mean different things.

"This disc isn't in MusicBrainz." The database answered, and holds no disc with this layout. Common for self-published, regional and older discs. Search by hand, or rip anyway and let the post-rip pass resolve the tags.
"Couldn't reach MusicBrainz to identify this disc." The lookup failed rather than came back empty, so nothing is known either way. Re-insert the disc to try again. That retry matters: identification only re-runs when the disc in the drive changes, so leaving it sitting there will not have another go.

The two are kept apart deliberately: calling a disc absent when the truth is that we could not ask would push you into hand-picking a release that might match exactly on a second attempt.

The deck with no album details for the disc. The heading reads Unknown artist, Unknown album, and the list below is numbered Track 1 to Track 7, each with the running time read off the disc. The green readout shows 01 00:00 over TRACK 1, stopped, with the transport buttons, the mode buttons and Rip above the list. — No album details, so the tracks are listed by number.

Picking the release yourself

The Artist and Album boxes below the disc ID feed Search MusicBrainz; either on its own is enough. Results are ranked, never filtered: releases with the same number of tracks as your disc are marked same length as this disc and rise to the top, then single-disc releases, then the rest in MusicBrainz's own order. Nothing is hidden: a disc with a hidden or data track legitimately disagrees with the catalogue's count.

Click a result to adopt it. The panel then reads Matched by you, with an Undo link. That wording is deliberately unlike an automatic match: a hand pick is a person asserting the identity, and that identity goes on to retag your files.

If nothing comes back, try the album alone, or a shorter spelling.

A boxed set, and it cannot tell which disc

Hand-pick a release covering several discs and one more question follows: which one is in the drive, each disc listed with its track count and marked where the length agrees.

Vesari will not answer that for you. A disc it could not identify by layout is one no medium of the release claims, so the data genuinely does not say which you are holding. Guessing would tag your files from the wrong disc, and could move the wrong copies aside during an upgrade. Choose the disc, or press Back to search.

If the rip already happened

Where the whole disc matched nothing, the tracks are filed under "Unknown".

Where only some tracks missed - the common case, when a disc no database lists is still resolved track by track - the ones that missed can usually stay with the rest of the disc: when most of the disc resolved and those tracks agree on one album, that album is written to the tracks that missed, so they stay in the album instead of dropping out of it on their own. If the disc is mostly unidentified, or the tracks that did resolve disagree about the album, nothing is written - a guessed album across a whole disc is worse than a visible gap on one track. Either way the tracks that missed have no title of their own, so they show up under the file name until you add one.

Track numbers come from the disc's own table of contents wherever the rip could read it, so a four-track single is numbered 1 to 4 even when the matched recordings sit at other positions on a larger release. On the rare disc where the rip cannot line the numbers up - a partial re-rip, or a disc whose table of contents repeats a position - the numbers are left exactly as they were rather than guessed at.

The finished-rip panel offers Add tags in Tag Editor, which opens exactly those tracks. Opening more than one at a time gives you album-level fields only; per-track titles are set a track at a time.

For a wrong-edition match, Super-Tag and the Tag Editor will both put it right. See also Wrong or missing metadata.

Still stuck

If a disc you know is catalogued refuses to identify across several attempts, use Report a Bug in Settings and quote the disc ID on the page. It bundles your last three days of logs, which include library file paths, so read How to report a problem first.

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