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."
Freedb2? (Score:3, Interesting)
Man, this takes me back... (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Many digital music collections, mine included, owe a lot to freedb.
Re:Thanks, Michael (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Grip? (Score:3, Interesting)
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:MusicBrainz is superior to FreeDB (Score:2, Interesting)