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)
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.
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: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.
Not clear that the GFDL/GPL can cover the database (Score:1)
After the split I exchanged an email or two with Horar about licensing problems he might be getting into, even though, thank God, IANAL.
The legalities of applying the GFDL or GPL to a database like the one managed by freedb.org are unclear. If you are interested and have deep pockets, you can try to get the courts to clear this up for us (although you might have to secretly agree to pay for Horar's lawyer, also, otherwise he might just shut down instead of waiting for a clear decision).
AFAIK, the data
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.
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This is also the reason Windows MCE & Vista have / will have no EPG in Australia - TV guide data is collated separately by a third party (HWW, which itself was recently bought by a television / media conglomerate (PBL / Ni
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That sucks for Australian listeners, but copyright law is dictated by jurisdiction. If I am sitting in American, I can suck-down FreeDB2 data, and do anything that I want with it. For any copy of this data sitting in the US, no matter how it got there, it is practically in the public domain*. Australian law cannot impact this.
* The data is in the public domain, a particular 'expression' of the data can be copyrigh
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I don't know, but I am buying a T-shirt from your link.
My prediction (Score:2, Funny)
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The new name will be TrackType.org
freedom at any price (Score:5, Funny)
Well, given the name, I hope they got it for free.
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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
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All of the folder/file name settings I used in Grip can be duplicated in sound-juicer. YMMV though.. and it's been quite stable since 2.14.0. The only thing it does not do is cache the result of CD look-ups, so if you want to rip a CD where there's no Internet access you're on your own.
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All I really want it something that isn't bitrate based and can just run lame with these options:
lame --replaygain-accurate -q 0 --vbr-new --preset standard -p
KAudioCreator does, so it wins for me.
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Is the lame module for GStreamer more feature-limited? I use flac2mp3 to generate my MP3s, sorry.
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In the future freedb2.org will be importing and merging the data from a number of sources such as MusicBrainz and, as the resources become available, making all that information accessible in real-time via RSS feeds and the like.
The trouble with freedb is that it never has been free enough and I am working hard to try to change that.
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MusicBrainz (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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While I agree that freedb is lagging behind CDDB (Gracenote) in most if not all ways in technology and data format, it's absurd to say that musicbrainz is ahead of them both. Musicbrainz doesn't even support the concept of music genre, for crying out loud. The page you link to says that's because they can't figure out how to support genres correctly?! So does that mean if you use musicbrainz (man that name is weak) to rip your music, you have to
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.
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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.
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Well, this is more of an explanation of why FreeDB sucks, not an answer to the GP ;-)
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(And no, this [musicbrainz.org] doesn't count. And I know CDDB doesn't have that info either.)
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.
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Joerg Hevers (and more recently, Ari Sundholm) did all the work while Michael Kaiser merely took all the credit and money. Why did you think they all resigned the way they did?
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set up a _free_ service, operate it for 7 years, become successful with it and shut up until then. It takes more than you probably can handle on your own. Jörg and Ari left me after the *thought* you would play fair. To my knowledge, freedb2.org is still operated on YOUR own. Please explain, why Jörg and Ari refused to work with you.
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They should make the database public (Score:2, Redundant)
-S
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)
MAGIX gets a thumbs (Score:1)