An accusation that comes up now and then from people new to QMP is that it contains some sort of spyware.  Usually this is because they see that QMP comes with something called [[Gracenote]] or their firewall tells them that QMP tried to connect to the Internet.  This article is meant to educate users on what these are and why Quintessential Player uses them.


======Quintessential Player tries to connect to the Internet======
There's several reasons why QMP might connect to the Internet.  Obviously, if you try to play an online radio stream, QMP will need to connect to the remote server for that. QMP will also connect to the Internet on startup to see if a new version is available.   



======Quintessential Player includes Gracenote======
Quintessential player also makes use of services from [[http://www.gracenote.com/music/|Gracenote]].  The primary purpose of Gracenote is music identification, or MusicID.  For example, when you play a CD in QMP, QMP will connect to Gracenote's online service to look up information about the CD, such as the artist and track titles.  You may be familiar with this service by its previous name, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB|CDDB]].  QMP also uses Gracenote to look up information about other music files you have, and uses this information to fill in missing information in the [[media library]], or to automatically add [[tags]] to your files ([[Auto Tag]]).  Gracenote is also used in several other players, such as WinAmp and iTunes.