Gracenote

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Gracenote Inc.

Type	Subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America
Founded	1998
Headquarters	Emeryville, California, USA
Products	Digital music recognition technology
Employees	95 (2006)
Website	www.gracenote.com

Gracenote, Inc. is a company that maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs. It provides software and metadata to businesses that enable their customers to manage and search digital media. Gracenote provides its media management technology and global media database of digital entertainment information to the mobile, automobile, portable, home, and PC markets. Several computer software applications that are capable of playing CDs, such as Winamp and iTunes, use Gracenote’s CDDB technology. Gracenote’s database was originally created from and continues to receive voluntary contributions from users.

In addition to its CD track-identification system, Gracenote operates a digital file identification service which allows digital music files (such as MP3s) to be identified, and a media management service for the generation of playlists, and recommendation of music.

On April 22, 2008, Sony announced that it will acquire Gracenote for $260 million USD.^[1] The acquisition was completed on June 2, 2008.^[2]

1 Products
2 Customers
3 See also
4 Notes and references
5 External links

[edit] Products

Gracenote offers a number of products including MusicID, Mobile MusicID, Music Enrichment, Discover, Playlist, Playlist Plus, Media VOCS, Classical Music Initiative, and Link. In April 2007, Gracenote launched the first^{[citation needed]} legal lyrics offering in the U.S.

[edit] Customers

iTunes uses Gracenote’s CD track identification services.^[3]

In addition, Gracenote provides its products to a number of other services including

Online services including Yahoo! Music Jukebox, AOL Winamp;
Home and Automotive products from Alpine, Bose, Panasonic, Phillips, and Sony;
Mobile music applications from Samsung^[4], Sony Ericsson (TrackID), KDDI (Japan), KTF (Korea), Musicwave (Europe).