What is my Google Drive up to when I rip CD's?

Alobar

Addicted Member
This has started recently, when I rip a CD to my NAS in Win 10 using JRiver I get a notification from Google that "Audio CD" was successfully backed up. This wouldn't seem to be the case as when I open and look at Google drive, each track is only exactly 44 bytes. Good thing as if they were backing up an actual CD file, my free account would be maxed in a few CD's.
So what are they up to? Is this to understand what sort of music I listen to for the purposes of Google's streaming service? I have not knowingly given them permission on this but probably have in fine print somewhere. Or is this something more about what JRiver is doing as I do back up my library files to Google. Knowing what a information mining freak Google is I have to think info gathering is the reason as this backup seems useless to me otherwise.

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The timing is interesting on this one.
I got a notification a few days ago while on a trip that I had reached my 15GB limit, yet I only ever put word docs in the drive.
My guess is that my new phone is backing up pictures to my Drive account (haven't had time to investigate).

I'd bet a nickel that Drive is auto-starting when you start your computer, and it's set to archive new data like that.
Why it would only do 44Kb per song is weird, though I remember something from the early days of MP3 ripping where a small chunk of metadata got added each time a file was ripped and saved (i.e. rip a .wav to a .wav and the 2nd file is identical to the first, but with extra metadata. And so on.)
Maybe it's just saving the metadata?

If you wouldn't mind answering a JRiver/Pi question, can you PM me?
 
The timing is interesting on this one.
I got a notification a few days ago while on a trip that I had reached my 15GB limit, yet I only ever put word docs in the drive.
My guess is that my new phone is backing up pictures to my Drive account (haven't had time to investigate).

I'd bet a nickel that Drive is auto-starting when you start your computer, and it's set to archive new data like that.
Why it would only do 44Kb per song is weird, though I remember something from the early days of MP3 ripping where a small chunk of metadata got added each time a file was ripped and saved (i.e. rip a .wav to a .wav and the 2nd file is identical to the first, but with extra metadata. And so on.)
Maybe it's just saving the metadata?

If you wouldn't mind answering a JRiver/Pi question, can you PM me?
I would say that the photos being backed up is a setting in your Google account and a quick way to max out your cloud drive. About 95% of the pictures I take are not important and probably should be deleted. Mostly it is just the family stuff that I like having a copy uploaded so I do this manually.

I suspect this issue I am having is just Google saving a small portion of the file, and the metadata likely would be in a fix framework so it makes sense that the small 44 byte file is what they are doing. Why is another question, and why they notify me about it and store in my cloud drive instead of theirs is another.. How is this backup useful to me when I can't even open the files?

On the JRiver and RPi, PM forthcoming! Glad to try to help if I can..
 
The Google Music service that allows you to 'upload' your music to Google, and then play 'your' music anywhere uses track analysis (and/or metadata matching) to identify the track, so will not upload anything unless a match isn't found.

It's possible the Google has 'backed up' your music in this way, in which case, the 44 bytes would be an identifier to the same track in the Google Music server.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play_Music

I note your tracks aren't named; the 'backup' appears to be of the raw CD .cda (and supporting) files, not the ripped and metadata-tagged/re-named WAV/FLAC. Have you got JRiver set up to get and apply metadata tags & filenames?
 
beware, .cda files are only pointers used for windows explorer to the actual content of the audio CD, hence their very small size. Do not throw the CD away yet !

I cant help with jriver but if you rip the CD audio stream you should end with .wav or .flac files in the end
 
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