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Perhaps the CDIndex (soon to be musicbrainz.org) people can answer this: would it be possible to merge the efforts of FreeDB and Musicbrainz? It seems very wasteful to duplicate the effort for a free CDDB replacement, not just for the project developers but for the end users typing in track info for both. I'm specifically wondering whether

• the licences are compatible - CDIndex has its own licence which might conflict with the GPL
• the underlying structure is compatible.

The second question strikes me as particularly important - CDIndex is moving to a completely track-based design that should be media independent and make up for the limitations of the CDDB formula. The problem with this is that temporary backward compatibility with the CDDB would be a real asset in allowing people to use CDDB-enabled clients of various kinds and simply point them at a different server. It also better allows for the quiet updating people have been doing with clients like grip, where the CDDB info is re-uploaded from the client machine to FreeDB, slowly mirroring the database. To my knowledge, CDIndex has never been compatible with the CDDB format (even before switching to the track-based musicbrainz format).

Actually, www.musicbrainz.org is the successor to CDINDEX. Basically, we took the existing CD lookup infrastructure for CDINDEX, made a nice XML based client, and added single track based audio signatures, to create a system that can lookup cds, mp3's, and (coming soon) streams. In the last week, since we started the current open beta (which you can access through the freeamp player) we have built up over 15K song to metadata mappings, with more appearing every day. -Sean Ward