present invention may be used for compact discs dvds minidiscs u2122 or even non disc recording media such as tapes or solid state memory the present invention is not limited to music recordings but may used with video and data recordings where additional information about the recordings is stored in a remote database 13 the recorded signals include anything stored on the recordings including control information such as table of contents toc data in the following description the term compact disc or its abbreviation cd will be used interchangeably with u201c recording u201d since cds are commonly used recordings today thus recording transport 12 may be a cd changer mechanism controller 14 may be any suitable control device such as microchip pic16c67 or motorola 6805 or the controller used in conventional changers an advantage to using a programmable controller like the pic16c67 is that it is possible to download a new program for controller 14 to change the operation of the apparatus as described below furthermore more than one device may be used to perform the functions of controller 14 for example conventional cd changer operations may be performed by one device and the processing of disc ids and database queries described below may be performed by a second device which is more likely to be programmable volatile memory 16 may be used for storing information obtained from the recorded signal output by recording transport 12 such as information obtained from the table of contents or toc on the recording an example of what is stored in volatile memory 16 is illustrated in fig2 the toc of cds for example.