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Freedb.org Returns to Life
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Oct 05, 2006 06:39 PM
from the good-to-see-them-back dept.
from the good-to-see-them-back dept.
Trogre writes "The recently troubled free CD database freedb has been picked up by a group called Magix. From Kaiser's blog: 'Following my announcement that I would like to let freedb go, I was approached by many interested parties ... Even if I shall no longer be actively associated with freedb, I shall continue casting a critical glance on freedb's future. The decision in favour of MAGIX has given us a new prospect of further development, offered a congenial and comfortable atmosphere during difficult negotiations, and provided the newly implemented hardware with generous capacities.' This might be good news since Grip still doesn't support MusicBrainz."
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Freedb.org Ending 245 comments
haroldag writes "Freedb, the free music database used by tons of CD ripping software, has been shut down due to a disagreement among its developers. One of its developers used a data dump from the original freedb.org and is providing the service at freedb2.org, though, and will be adding features and posting them at his site as they become available. Unfortunately, a database dump or source code for freedb2.org is yet nowhere to be found."
[+]
Ask Slashdot: Should freedb's Data Be Public Domain? 210 comments
Horar asks: "There's been a lot of recent fuss over freedb. My position is that freedb was just not free enough, and I would like to find a way to bring all the data into the public domain, just as MusicBrainz has done with much of their data. I had not thought that this would be possible until I received advice from various parties suggesting that it was. So now I ask Slashdot if this is true? Can the freedb data legally be brought into the public domain at this time, and if so how? Most importantly, would it be 'The Right Thing To Do'?"
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Freedb2? (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday February 15 2007, @08:00PM)
Re:Freedb2? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
They seem to have taken it a bit personally if you ask me, but then again there might have been more going on than publically stated.
Re:Freedb2? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://asmith.id.au/)
http://freedb2.org/ [freedb2.org] continues to thrive and grow and has been very well supported. I would like to thank everybody for that, and can guarantee that you will be able to enjoy the superior levels of service offered by freedb2.org for a long time to come. Please feel free to email me directly should you have any specific questions about it.
Re:Freedb2? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cool. So where can I download your database?
I'm not joking. I can download wikipedia. I downloaded a couple versions of the original cddb back when we were all running off Sparcstations.
The way we got here was to freely exchange metadata about CDs we own. freedb2.org doesn't say anything about how to get at the data behind it. In fact, it doesn't really say anything at all about where its data came from. (Before you claim that you can't pay for the bandwidth to support downloads of your full database, trust me, I can find somewhere to host it for you.)
I typed in plenty of CD metadata. I showed you mine; so show me yours.
Re:Not clear that the GFDL/GPL can cover the datab (Score:4, Informative)
IANAL, however as I understand it under US law: it is not possible to apply any license to this database, because the licenses are grants of rights, based on the copyright of the owner. However, copyright does not apply to this data. No one can hold a copyright on 'facts', only 'expressions'. A clearly stated (though no more authoritative) explanation from the 'copyright' article on wikipedia:
Compilations of facts or data may also be copyrighted, but such a copyright is thin; it only applies to the particular selection and arrangement of the included items, not to the particular items themselves.
freedom at any price (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.atomjax.com/)
Well, given the name, I hope they got it for free.
MusicBrainz (Score:5, Informative)
MusicBrainz is superior to FreeDB (Score:5, Informative)
CDDB and FreeDB are old news. MusicBrainz [musicbrainz.org] is by far superior. It accounts for different release years, different formats, multiple artists, compilation albums, etc. "Why would I need to use your site? What's wrong with FreeDB?" [musicbrainz.org].
I'm not affiliated, just another happy user.
Re:MusicBrainz is superior to FreeDB (Score:4, Interesting)
Genre is a broken concept and everybody knows it. Practically every CD ever released is listed in FreeDB under half a dozen different genres, all entries having slightly different errors. No FreeDB booster was ever able to sufficiently explain to me why, for example, Hotel California should be listed under New Age.
The multiple genre CDDB defect has this amusing side effect in all FreeDB-reliant CD rippers:
Multiple results found. Please choose:
1) The Same Title
2) The Same Title
3) The Same Title
4) The Same Title
The system is practically useless for anyone who actually cares about consistency in metadata and/or has a large collection to rip.
Man, this takes me back... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.tuneforge.com/)
So at their request, I built a system which would send a query to the CDDB.com page (back before they became Gracenote), excise out the useful data, and store it, one album at a time.
I got it through proof of concept, and then explained while it was technically possible to continue in this vein (I had probably pulled three albums correctly in testing, one more at the demo), they would be fools to continue because the page format could change at any time, and if the fine folks at CDDB figured out what we were doing, the owners would be begging for a lawsuit.
They still didn't want to do the right thing, so the project eventually got dropped (I think Napster made the CD go bye-bye), I moved on to greener pastures, and the owners went on to found a handful of failed dot-bombs, I guess.
Ah, the good old days.
Thanks, Michael (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://nostatic.org/grip)
Many digital music collections, mine included, owe a lot to freedb.
They should make the database public (Score:2, Redundant)
(Last Journal: Tuesday April 08 2003, @10:19PM)
-S
Re:They should make the database public (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday April 08 2003, @10:19PM)
http://www.freedb.org/en/download__database.10.ht
I could have sworn that I'd loooked for that before and couldn't find it.
-S (feeling like a dipshit)
MAGIX gets a thumbs (Score:1)
(http://frankz.emilhouse.com/)
Re:Grip? (Score:1, Offtopic)
(http://slashdot.org/)
It crashes much more often, has far fewer options for, well, everything but especially encoding and tagging, and just generally feels like beta software.
Maybe in a couple of years it might approach the functionality of grip. Or perhaps by then grip will have MusizBrainz support