This article is fascinating.

Gracenote certainly is not a trustworthy source of music market information. Also, I certainly do not want them handling any of my personal information, such as what is in my music collection.

Musicbrainz and FreeDB are nice and seem to be more trustworthy. I also enjoy allmusic.com; the data is richer and more comprehensive, by far, than anything I have accessed on the internet.

Thanks for the kind comment, Don.

A few weeks after I wrote this I bumped into Rob Kaye, the main guy behind Musicbrainz, while he was in Europe. Quite rightly he called me on the point that I'd spotted an error in the Musicbrainz database and hadn't logged in to correct it. I have now. You can't do that with CDDB.

gracenote usually comes on automaticly when i put music into my walkman, but not always... why is that??

Roy, If it's an intermittent fault, I suggest you direct your question to Sony.