Freedb.org Returns to Life 49
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."
MusicBrainz (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Freedb2? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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:They should make the database public (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:Freedb2? (Score:5, Informative)
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:MusicBrainz is superior to FreeDB (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC, it's because the database entries are plain text files named "[genre]/[CD checksum].txt" -- if two different CDs have the same checksum, then they have to be in different genres. Also, one can't update the genre of a CD once entered, you can only create a new entry somewhere else.
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.