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Back in the 1990s, I helped run one of several mirrors for CDDB. When the company suddenly took a proprietary turn, they shut all of those down. They sent message promising to give some sort of reward to everyone who had run a mirror, but nothing ever showed up.

I guess a couple of million would probably make it up....

In seriousness, this was an early wakeup call about contributing to "community" projects without clear licenses for submitted data. And here I will put in a plug for FreeDB, which forked the original and continues to run it in an open way, with submissions under the GPL. http://www.freedb.org/en/about...

My main problem with most music player software today is the idea of a 'media library'. In order to play a file, you first have to put it in the library. I understand such a database has its benefits, but to me it is unnecessary complication of a simple operation. In fact, I do have a custom script for managing music files burnt to DVDs, but in the unix spirit I like to keep thing separate, so I am free to use different players.

Years ago, I made a web based mp3 jukebox called Grind!.

  If you've ever glimpsed at the utter clusterfuck of metadata in music files, you understand why there are databases. ID3 tags were often wrong or in a weird format. (Bonus points if the ID3v1 and the ID3v2 conflicted.), and FreeDB had a very annoying format back in the early 2000s when I did this. (Storing both title and artist information in the same field in a trivially extensible tagged metadata format is beyond stupid.)

Even if you fixed all the metadata and coupled it with each individual track by using ID3v2 or something like it (and you should in order to be a good citizen), you still need to cache the metadata outside of individual files for performance reasons. You don't want to have to crawl the disk, opening, seeking to the end, and reading and reading the last 1k or so, to list every artist in the music collection. Crawling a disk like this really slow.

That said, that the metadata store just needs to be consistent, but not overly tight. By overly tight, I mean the original music files have to be easily extractable. Back when I was made jukebox, most of the other web based jukeboxes were copying every mp3 into MySQL as a blob column for god awful reason. That's super dumb. All you need is the path to the file, after all, the file system already stores generic bytes. If the db crashes, you're super screwed. Especially when you consider that many people are going to delete their original files after they've been copied into the db, since music collections are large and there's no reason to keep two copies on a disk.

The other thing you'd like in a media library is the ability to get the metadata back out of the library. This is the main reason why you want to keep a copy of the metadata tightly coupled (i.e. integrated) with the media files. It's my data. I'll do what I want to with them.

In all honesty, iTunes does a relatively good of this. The media files are stored on the disk in an easily understandable form (i.e. hashed names) under ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/ , and the metadata is stored in uncompressed xml file named ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml The only thing I'm not sure about is the album artwork, and whether it updates the id3v2 tags to be consistent with the assumed correct information stored in the xml file. It's a good system. It's unixy.

People loved when CDDB offered to identify CD's so when ripping you could not have to type everything in for your music app. Many people donated time to this "project"... but once it was done, suddenly developers started to have to pay Gracenote for the data, and"free" music programs went away for paid-for-somehow models like Windows Media Player, iTunes, and the such.

They just used Free DB instead. K3B works just fine apart from the dd typo (and checking track names when you rip is not a huge issue).

Can't you just redirect the gracenote CDDB URLs in your hosts file, to the FreeDB ones?
(See Point 4 here. )

When they get the genre thing figured out, track preview and sale by track are the next items required to get them up to the bare-bones standards of online music sales.

They already did, it's just that they're all Rock.

The CDDB was coded as a free repository of CD metadata. Collected by thousands of people around the Net on a worldwide, ongoing basis, by giving away the client SW which many programmers embedded into PC/Mac music players. So millions of people were prompted every time they put in an unknown CD to spend a few seconds typing in artist and song names. In exchange (though no input was required), they got most of their CDs labeled without any effort, after the CDDB was filled.

This kind of read/write database population collaboration is now well known, both in blogs and in more sophisticated databases like Wikipedia. But in the late 1990s it was revolutionary.

Then the CDDB server owners sold out to Gracenote. Gracenote required a login to access the data, which login they supplied only to licensed users. Gracenote first tried to sell CD players integrated with the CDDB, but then found more success in licensing access to iTunes and other online music distributors.

But neither Gracenote nor the CDDB programmers had produced the profitable data. The people who had were locked out. So some new programmers made a new version with the identical API and DB structure, the FreeDB, then datamined the CDDB to populate it. The FreeDB and its contents are GPL, so they cannot be "taken proprietary" (stolen) again. The data is free again, as is the life of this pioneering colalborative project.

If you are generating music metadata, consider submitting it to the FreeDB. And try to use the FreeDB, rather than the privateer CDDB, to support you applications. And send money to the FreeDB operators whenever you can, especially if you use it.

The CDDB was coded as a free repository of CD metadata. Collected by thousands of people around the Net on a worldwide, ongoing basis, by giving away the client SW which many programmers embedded into PC/Mac music players. So millions of people were prompted every time they put in an unknown CD to spend a few seconds typing in artist and song names. In exchange (though no input was required), they got most of their CDs labeled without any effort, after the CDDB was filled.

This kind of read/write database population collaboration is now well known, both in blogs and in more sophisticated databases like Wikipedia. But in the late 1990s it was revolutionary.

Then the CDDB server owners sold out to Gracenote. Gracenote required a login to access the data, which login they supplied only to licensed users. Gracenote first tried to sell CD players integrated with the CDDB, but then found more success in licensing access to iTunes and other online music distributors.

But neither Gracenote nor the CDDB programmers had produced the profitable data. The people who had were locked out. So some new programmers made a new version with the identical API and DB structure, the FreeDB, then datamined the CDDB to populate it. The FreeDB and its contents are GPL, so they cannot be "taken proprietary" (stolen) again. The data is free again, as is the life of this pioneering colalborative project.

If you are generating music metadata, consider submitting it to the FreeDB. And try to use the FreeDB, rather than the privateer CDDB, to support you applications. And send money to the FreeDB operators whenever you can, especially if you use it.

What good is the original db being available, open, free if no one can realistically use it in the real world?

freedb.org lists here http://www.freedb.org/en/applications__freedb_awar e_applications.9.html more than 60 applications - free, non-free, Windows, Mac, Linux - which can use freedb. You name one popular proprietry application -itunes- that can't use freedb and then say that non-one can use freedb in the real world. Makes no sense.

What the fscking fsck are you talking about ?

Yeah right, so the community had to duplicate a lot of the work that was "donated" to CDDB,

What, exactly, had to be duplicated ? AFAIK ALL of the data and code are still there, FREE (as in beer AND speech) for everybody to download, use and modify.

His point that the data before CDDB went commercial can still be downloaded is flawed; we're interested in what happened *after* you took all that hard work that you got for free and started charging for it.

What do you call "it" ? Access to their server? Supplemental information which was NOT entered by previous users? The supplemental services / recognition methods they have developed since then ? By what kind of fscked up logic are they expected to give that away for free ?

Gracenote did not steal anything at all, neither legally, nor morally. You do not have a fundamental right to use someone else's servers for free. If you don't need any of THEIR added value, then don't fscking use it ! If you feel their services are valuable, then pay up !

Freedb only exists because people built it from scratch after CDDB started charging.

What would you say if Freedb suddenly locked down and started charging?

While you're right that legally Gracenote did nothing wrong, morally their actions were pretty nasty, because they took all the information that the community input into their database *for free* and then started making a profit out of it without giving back to the community. And "all the data you input up until we went commercial is here for you to use" doesn't count.

Imagine if Wikipedia suddenly said "well, so long and thanks for all the fish, we're going commercial, oh and by the way, here's the archive of all your contributions so far, feel free to use it for whatever while I become a billionaire". Legal? yes. Feels right? nope.

As for the data, I can only point out that all of the data ever submitted to CDDB before it became "privatized" has been released to the public. You can go to freedb.org any time and download that entire database, including all the data that users entered before CDDB became commercial.

OK... public appology here. Me = moron.

http://www.freedb.org/en/download__database.10.htm l

I could have sworn that I'd loooked for that before and couldn't find it.

-S (feeling like a dipshit)

The database is 380MB. You can download it via BitTorrent using http://tracker.freedb.org/ I grabbed my own copy the minute the site's future became an issue so that I had my own permanent copy of everything I had ever contributed.

The software and the data can be downloaded here too: http://www.freedb.org/modules.php?name=Sections&so p=listarticles&secid=7/.

They supply copies of their databases via BitTorrent - http://tracker.freedb.org/

(which arguably is more valuable than the server side software).

It's the free CD information DB, like CDDB... http://freedb.org/

Uh, yeah. I know that. Where do you think CDDB got all their information before they started selling it? From suckers like you and me who typed in all the CD information. Then, one day, all of a sudden CDDB decided to put all these restrictions on who could access "their" database. "Oh yeah. You built this database for us. Thanks. Now if you want to actually use it, well..."

Hence, freedb sprung up as an attempt to start all over and do it right. Now apparently there's a question of whether the FreeDB database is public domain.

Insane.

It's the free CD information DB, like CDDB... http://freedb.org/

Note: I am most certainly not a lawyer.

freedb.org claims the data is licensed under the GPL; therefore, you should have the right to distribute it as you see fit, provided you comply with the GPL.

As far as whether you can free it from the GPL, I believe the answer is no. While the data is arguably merely facts, and therefore not protected by copyright law, I think there was a copyright amendment recently that made a particular compilation of data subject to copyright. I don't know whether it passed or not.

Here's the Slashdot article on the subject. Unfortunately, TFA it links to is gone.

Please read this page: http://www.freedb.org/index.php

According to the Freedb.org FAQ the discid kinda sucks and is dependant on the total length in seconds and the number of tracks on the disc. If you're taking the tracks from an LP then I guess you were really lucky and got the total album length correct to within a second after you burnt the tracks to cd.

For almost two years now Ari and I have supported a developer from Australia, who was working on the next generation of the freedb server, which would have overcome most of our current technological problems and offered text searching. This was the biggest chance for freedb in years. Unfortunately there have been rising tensions in our team about the question, how long we should support a development project, which has not yet been made open source by the developer and which is not yet running on freedb servers. Last weekend the line was crossed by the founder of freedb, who owns the domain, when he took action against that developer without talking to the rest of the team first, while we were still trying to find a solution in everyone's interest.

By the Power of BitTorrent, the freedb.org database is made available to all.

Today, you can get the .torrent file on http://tracker.freedb.org/ - but if it ever becomes unavailable there, you can use a DHT-aware Bittorrent client such as Azureus and get it by using this info hash: 21AF020252FD2E556B683CEB123689733E0BC063

I, for one, have allocated a total of 16mbps of bandwith on four hosts to help seed this database. I'm seeing a total swarm performance of around 25mbps, so this should be a fast download for anybody who wants it.

Go ahead: feel the Power of BitTorrent and share this free database!

Share, my friends, share!

Jesus Just Left Chicago...

http://gracenote.com/music/search-adv.html?q=&qart ist=&qdisc=&qtrack=Jesus+Just+Left+Chicago&n=10&x= 0&y=0
http://www.freedb.org/freedb_search.php?words=Jesu s+Just+Left+Chicago&allfields=NO&fields=track&allc ats=YES&grouping=none

The 100 song limit is not a huge deal [...snap...] It's only a big issue if you don't believe in listening to any song longer than 30 seconds or something.

No speedmetal then, and certainly no Ruoyi Ikeda, who only needs 20 minutes for 99 tracks.

This isn't like music where one usually only wants 1-3 tracks from the album.

Huh? Why would you only want 2 or 3 tracks from an album? I could understand if we were talking Fela Kuti here. Generally the album is the logical unit of musical expression, and it wouldn't make any more sense to just listen to 2 or 3 tracks then it would to just read 2 or 3 chapters from a book. Besides, if someone is talented they don't have any problem filling an album with worthwhile material.

You're thinking of cddb. No, it won't fit the bill.

Yes, it is nice to see someone taking a shot at a standard supported by the community to rate (open source) software. From what I took in from the article and related documents, I could not see any concrete indication on how the data will be collected and owned except for inside an example evaluation for Mambo. The license for the example is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. As it can be plainly seen, one of the sponsors is SpikeSource who has a vested interest in selling "certified" open-source software stacks and update services.

The questions that this project brings up, as well as potentially raise, are:

• Who will be evaluating the software?
• Who will own the evaluation data and what will its license be? (I'm thinking of reasoning behind freedb)
• What if I want to sell my own software stack, and I'd like to give it a composite rating using contributed rating data? Am I out of luck because the data is owned by the openbrr partners?
• Sure the rating matrix is open and standard, but what will be the mechanism in trust in the ratings? (How will we be able to determine the bias in the ratings? For example, what if JBoss contributed a rating for Apache Geronimo? Or more subtly, how would we trust a consulting company that is a "business partner" with MySQL to do a review on another database such as PostgreSQL?
• Perhaps codeZoo being a partner in this effort is an indication that it could become the primary storage location for the rating data? Whoever is going to be the primary distributor for this information will be making a bid to eclipse all the other open-source software portals such as freshmeat.

My take is I won't be interested in participating in a community project where participant contributions are not freely redistributable.

This is just like what happened to the CDDB (Compact Disc DataBase). It was open source, public server, free client. Millions of us entered our CD data, in exchange for access to everyone else's data, for free. Then the founders sold the operation to GraceNote corporation, which took it proprietary, and slapped licensing restrictions on access, protected by secure login - locking out all the "owners" of the shared data we'd entered.

Some other people cloned the DB server into FreeDB, and jumpstarted it by datamining the CDDB server while it was still publicly accessible. We'll probably need to do that with Wikipedia. How big is it? Since "Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License", we should take a page from the FreeDB folks who saved our data from privateering clutches. How big is Wikipedia, in GB? Sounds like a job for BitTorrent, or perhaps Archive.org, or maybe a more passive archive, which would redistribute it only if access is restricted. Just distributing copies of the valuable data we've all produced would probably preempt Google, or any other "benefactor" from taking Wikipedia private. Let's not repeat the history that stole from us.

Oh. My. God. An Alan Parsons Project reference.

*faints*

Depends on how it's done. Since I work for a company that has a sports database as a major component of it's product, and at least one competitor, I think it's quite important that they don't get it for free.

As long as other people are entitled to produce their own databases (which may or may not end up identical), the free products will still happen. And if they're good enough, they will happen. Take Freedb for example.

The freedb.org database is available for download.

The freedb.org database is available for download.

It gives you a FreeDB-driven web-based playlist manager and controls a running XMMS process. The XMMS Oddcast DSP plugin lets it shout to a local Icecast server so you can listen locally or remotely.

I also like the Crossfade plugin, for smooth transitions between songs.

GTRacer
- Who directs their Rayman-inspired vids?

You can do better than that.

In fact some CD's don't even go much past 30 minutes!

Tag & Rename is a great utility (windows) for . . .you guessed it - Tagging and Renaming MP3's (works for .ogg and .wma too). It can connect to FreeDB to retreive track info from your mp3's (if they're in the correct order, organized by album, etc). I've use it since ver. 1.3 and have loved it, once you get used to the interface.

freedb.org haven't added a general purpose search to the cddbd server. It can only be searched by discid.

The full-text search is still labelled experimental in CVS, though the page at freedb.org doesn't warn about that anymore.

I've chosen to download the database to a local server and tweak the server code (in C-- I'm nowhere with Perl) to allow full-text searches. I ripped about 30 CDs with EAC before I knew how to set the tagging options right so I'm missing track numbers.

freedb.org haven't added a general purpose search to the cddbd server. It can only be searched by discid.

The full-text search is still labelled experimental in CVS, though the page at freedb.org doesn't warn about that anymore.

I've chosen to download the database to a local server and tweak the server code (in C-- I'm nowhere with Perl) to allow full-text searches. I ripped about 30 CDs with EAC before I knew how to set the tagging options right so I'm missing track numbers.

sorry, here's the homepage of the freedb plugin for foobar. You just drop foo_freedb.dll into your components directory. This is of course only an interface between the freedb and the player. There are, as per link in parent, many others.

For all my searching needs I now use freedb.org

For example, there are a lot of mislabeled MP3s -- either the tags are "Unknown Artist / Track 8" or they're completely misspelled. Or you sometimes get the annoying thing where they're ripped from a compilation and the tags reflect that: the author is "Greatest Dance Hits" or even "Pottery Barn"

MP3 ID3 tags can be matched against long lists of known song titles and group / artist names. Such lists exist, e.g. at FreeDB.org.

Another need is that you might know a few lyrics of a song but not know who it's by or what it's called.

Again, match against data collections. A huge indexed collection of lyrics is enough. These days, when looking for the name of a song it's more often than not enough to enter lyrics $text-you-are-looking-for into Google.

Google has a bunch of smart people working for it, but I don't know if they'd necessarily have a head start on this problem. It's not the same as indexing the web.

It's not the same, but it's quite possible and a lot of Google's existing technology can be reused. I've often searched for PDFs in P2P systems. It's a great help if these are indexed for full text, something Google is doing already.

However, I'm not so optimistic about solving the legal problems as some other participants in this discussion.

For those who are lost, look here and try the song at the bottom of the page, although it doesn't seem to work for me (but I may not have Real installed). Lyrics here.

I tried to find an album on Amazon with a song preview, but gave up after looking at a few. Here's the list of albums with this song if you want to keep trying.

This reminds me of the cddb being stolen by Gracenote. Last time I checked, they were still claiming to own the database of audio discs (they may have changed their tune by now), despite the fact that it was built mostly from submissions by people like me. Gracenote basically took our diligent work, and started restricting access to it in order to make money. How do we know that they didn't build their own database? Because it contains entries for unpublished CDs that don't exist outside the homes of a few specific people; effectively honeytokens.

(Fortunately, an alternative now exists.)