Aaaaaaaaah, you mean ISRCs! International Standard(ised) Recording Codes. A little concerning that a manufacturing company's web site has the acronym wrong Also they've managed to use a UPC illustration for their article making it look even more amateur

Foreword: I work at a record label and wrangle ISRCs, EAN13s (UPCs for you non-Brits ) and various other metadata daily.

You almost have it but you've slightly misunderstood the purpose of ISRCs a bit: each sound recording -- each version of a recording, not each song -- is assigned a unique ISRC (well, supposedly unique; sometimes clashes do happen but it's fairly rare). They all work to an agreed 12-character format:

AA BBB CC DDDDD

AA = country in two-letter ISO format (e.g. GB)
BBB = label code (e.g. ABC), this is assigned when you first apply for an ISRC string from your country's representing body (BPI, RIAA etc)
CC = year of initial release, last two digits (12 for 2012)
DDDDD = five characters, 'free' text. Some labels have complex automated algorithms to generate these; the label I work for uses the last three digits of the catalogue number then the track number, e.g. 25601 for Track 01. If this was a two disc release and CD1 had twelve tracks, CD2 Track 01's ISRC would end 25613.


ISRCs are mandatory for all digital music sales; the stores use these to track sales and accuont to labels in reports. Makes sense really. What makes less sense is that all digital sales still require a barcode assigned to them, which makes even less sense when you consider that nobody - EVER - is going to scan or type in an EAN/UPC barcode when buying a digital file. There's very vague possibilities for tieing in digital media to physical CDs on sites like Amazon (where they cross-sell the MP3s on physical release pages) but this is tenuous and easily achievable with ISRC synchronicity.

ISRCs can be embedded in CD-TEXT for physical CD releases but they usually aren't. A good pressing plant should encode them if supplied but most days audio's supplied as a CDR master (not a gold master direct from the studio with all the metadata embedded like in ye olde days) because it's unnecessary. PQ encoding just ain't what it used to be, nobody bothers any more. I actually prefer having DDPs supplied to me from studios as they're basically a BIN/CUE with all the original metadata; I can edit the metadata and burn direct and preserve all the relevant encoded data as long as the burner supports writing of CD-TEXT.

M.E. John Vestman's already debunked a bunch of ISRC myths on his site:


There's also another international standard for identifying tracks called "GRID" (Global Release IDentifier, some people say it stands for Globally Recognised IDentifier) but we don't use it at work and I suspect hardly anyone else does outside of the three majors and the half-dozen or so 'major' indies.

If you get a file with an ISRC in, it's been added by that particular store - or by the encoder - I put ISRCs into my own encodes using the "ISRC" extended ID3v2 tag field, but it's not part of the base ID3 schema. Most hardware and software players will simply ignore the tag.


BTW to everyone please don't say "ISRC Code": the C in ISRC stands for Code so you're saying International Standard Recording Code Code which is both tautologous and makes you look stupid. (just like saying "PIN Number", the N in PIN stands for Number)

Putting the anorak away now.

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