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Freedb.org Ending
haroldag writes "Freedb, the free music database used by tons of CD ripping software, has been shut down due to a disagreement among its developers. One of its developers used a data dump from the original freedb.org and is providing the service at freedb2.org, though, and will be adding features and posting them at his site as they become available. Unfortunately, a database dump or source code for freedb2.org is yet nowhere to be found."
Actually, there is some code out there: http://asmith.id.au/mod_libpq.html
That sucks. I hope that freedb2 will be compatable with the old freedb protocol. Pretty much every open source tagger/ripper/whatever I know of uses freedb.
:)
Then again, maybe it's time for MusicBrainz to take over.
True, but all CD info databases have that problem, some more than others. But still, freedb was cool for when you just want to *play* a CD without ripping it. (Yep, people still do that.)
So for programs that use Freedb, e.g. I use dBpowerAMP, does this just mean that they won't be able to grab track listings anymore?
The quality of submissions were total, utter shit. You'd be better off typing in the info yourself.
Not so, well, not really. If you used it as a starting point, and checked the entries against the CD you were ripping then by and large the entries were really good. (Some freaky choices in categories sometimes)
Where there were issues, it was far easier to quickly edit one or two entries or the artist name etc. rather than type the whole thing in.
It is/was a great service.
I'm sorry the staff fell out, costing us access to a useful resource. freedb was a useful tool but it was always in need of improvement.
It really should have had facilities for submitting an md5 hash of the CD so end-users could avoid collisions, perhaps an easy way to edit or rate database entries, so that submissions where the track titles were wrong could be corrected by the community, etc...
Hopefully whatever replaces it will be better and more robust..
--
I have no CDs on hand here at work to see what happens when I try a db lookup, but does it mean that there is no info anymore on freedb on the lookup? Or is it just that any new entries have no-where to go?
What about the mirrors?
""Freedb, the free music database used by tons of CD ripping software, has been shut down due to a disagreement among its developers."
And in other news. Slashdot has been shut down due to a disagreement between Taco and CowboyNeal. The former likes the new layout, while the latter hates it. Apparently one of the readers has mirrored a copy of the "/. database to slashdot2, which will be undergoing a year long "burning server" effect.
So which one am I supposed to choose?
The one whose cd hash matches your cd? [insert picture of guy attempting to slit his wrist with an electric shaver, caption: "You're doing it wrong"] Each of those hashes are (supposed to be) a completely different disc, and in the case of all these different hashes, I suspect that they're from people who got a copy "ripped" from their friend, except instead of an actual copy, the guy tooks some mp3s from kazaa and burnt a cd from them. Recipient discovered that freedb didn't have an entry for this bogus disc and made one.
Personally, I've been wishing for a long time for cddb/freedb to just die already so we can re-standardize on a system that doesn't use a collision-prone hash with absolutely no way to deal with collisions (and no, marking it as a blues/ genre because some other CD was already posted in rock/ is not "dealing with it"). Maybe freedb2 can fix this.
"Another One Bites The Dust" ?
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I am the author of freedb2.org. It currently supports a subset of the old freedb protocol, enough to rip your CD's. Just point your software at http://freedb2.org/~cddb/cddb.cgi. There are also some new features which I will be documenting shortly. For some source code and a development history, please see http://asmith.id.au/freedb.html and also http://asmith.id.au/mod_libpq.html.
Obviously you have no idea what freedb does nor it's purpose.
Without the CD, the service is/was completely useless.
I already did. This is about tagging the CDs that I already own.
I rip my own CDs. Mostly because I like the convenience of listening to them on my laptop. Even here in Australia that is now legal, though it has always been tolerated.
Freedb just gives me track, artist and album names.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
RTFASummary even?
FreeDB provides CDDB info. In other words, a media player or cd ripper can contact the website with a hash of information specific to that CD or song and then return the name, artist, etc.
What does that have to do with being a cheap a-hole?
What?
You're gonna get flamed cuz you're a farking tard.
It's a CDDB system for looking up metadata on
commercial audio CD it has little to do w/piracy?
i dont think you know what youre talking about.
You should maybe have an idea of what the website actually did before spouting off some nonsense about stolen music.
fuckwit.
Obviously you didn't FTFM, or you're just a dumbass but to use freedb you have to have a physical CD, and chances are that was bought.
freedb had absolutly nothing to do with filesharing. If you had a cd, and wanted to rip it to mp3, ogg, flac, etc, you would want that file to be properly tagged. Everyone wants information like title, artist, name of album, order of songs on album, and year released, in every song they have stored digitally. Freedb only stored this information, to be used as you were ripping the cd, to automaticlly fill in all applicable information.
By what weird kind of logic does ripping a CD I own to my computer so that I can put the songs in a playlist, for example, have to do with "theft?" I have bought the music, and freedb was very convenient for me.
I hate to see things like this its sad when projects fail just because people can't seem to work together.
TheADDkid.com
"Freedb, the free music database used by tons of CD ripping software, has been shut down due to a disagreement among its developers." ...What a db.
Just stop being a bunch of cheap a-holes and BUY music that you like.
Umm if I was downloading MP3s from P2P networks, why would I need a freedb tagger? Find a source with EAC verified, high bitrate, properly tagged music and forget using this, chances are if it doesn't got the tags it'll suck anyway. CDDB, FreeDB and the like are fixes for an outdated format (CD Audio) from a time when noone needed those tags. Unless you think all the people ripping their own CDs to their iPod / PCs / HTPCs / media centers are thieves. This is too braindead to even be good flamebait.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes, you are going to get flamed for this, because it's an idiotic and irrelevant statement.
Freedb.org was invaluable to me when I was ripping the 700-odd CDs THAT I OWN.
Muppet. Accurate track listing database != music piracy. Get over it.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
I just now remembered what I did once, quite a while ago:
.wav, burned them to CD using gcdmaster, and ripped them to OGG, only to find that the ripping program actually guessed *correctly* the album and the titles of all the included songs.
I recorded some of my (difficult-to-find) LPs to
Note that even though I marked the beginning and end of each song manually, it still found the right titles. freedb really rocks!
On one hand, I guess I can't criticize them too harshly, because it's not as though many of us (myself included) who are using the service were paying the developers any for their time, on the other hand, it seems a little unfortunate that the one developer decided to just abruptly pull the plug on the service when it was in use by so many people, without trying to see if there were others in the community of users willing to take over the project, if he no longer wanted to manage it.
It seems like there were three people on the project, and two of them wanted to take it non-free, one didn't; although I'm glad the remaining developer didn't go along with the other guys if they really wanted to make it non-free, I can't really understand why he would choose to just kill it outright rather than find people who were willing to maintain it, if nothing else.
I'm not sure whether this shows a shortcoming of the collaborative development model or not. It seems like it might be -- although I suppose projects managed by a "benevolent dictator" are also prone to shutting down if the person moves on / dies / whatever; however it seems like the a not insignificant number of projects that are run by teams without a clear leader close due to 'personality conflicts' over time.
On the other hand -- what is it with CD meta-databases and going non-free? Is it just that they seem like tempting revenue sources or what?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The only pirate here is the butt-smuggling parent poster with zero understanding of technology.
on behalf of all of us geeks,
Thanks!
Add to your hostfile:Ugly, but it might work.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
At the end of proprietary software development, the project ends and the free software community has to either do without or start anew from whatever they've got (which is not the proprietary program's source code and a license to run, inspect, share, and modify at any time for any reason). At the end of a free software project, others can pick up where the former free software hackers left off and continue improving the free software. If the license for the program is a copylefted free software license, the improved software continues to be free.
Let's hope source code for freedb2.org and database dumps from freedb2.org are shared under a free software license so that if freedb2.org dies we're not left with nothing but an increasingly out-of-date freedb.org database and freedb.org software.
Thanks so much for all the work, freedb.org hackers. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.
Digital Citizen
While I believe that free, open source software is very good and should be used more widely, this is an example of where corporate solutions can prevail.
I've used FreeDB for a while now with the CD ripping program I use (Goldwave, highly recommended), and it had its pros and cons.
On the plus side, I could find listings for more foreign/anime CDs than I could using CDDB (a corporate company, used by the likes of WinAmp and WMP, I believe).
On the minus side, there were a few moderately popular to very popular CDs that had no listing. Also, more than a few CDs (including the foreign CDs mentioned) had more than one listing, each with small differences (some with large differences, such as translated song titles, or even just misspelled words), so you had to go through each one to find one that suited you. (One might argue that the choice was good, but in this case it was just annoying.)
The reason that FreeDB stopped is because those in the lead couldn't come to a decision. This would almost never happen in a corporate environment. Any dispute would go up the chain until it hit the CEO or board of directors, where a firm decision one way or another would be made. In the mean time, the product would merely remain unchanged (unless company policy specifies otherwise), so there would be no interruption in service.
Had FreeDB used a similar hierarchy (which they may have had, but it just fell apart), this might have been avoided. The programmers/engineers would dispute something, and the project lead/lead engineer would hear both sides and say "This is this, and that's that."
Certainly, this will be an inconvenience to those who use programs that use FreeDB, but have no idea that the program does.
Not quite. Apparently the hashes are an ad-hoc mechanism created specifically for cddb, and there *are* collisions.
http://outcampaign.org/
It gets in the way of good ideas.
Damn... burningserver.com is taken! That'd be a pretty sweet domain name...
Without the CD, the service is/was completely useless.
WTF? I guess you don't use foobar2000, and you ain't none too smart either else you could have figured it out yourself...
By the Power of BitTorrent, the freedb.org database is made available to all.
.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
Today, you can get the
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!
It's cute when grrrls get it soooo wrong. You don't know what a cddb is, do you?
Joerg on freedb:
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.
Well, if I'm reading between the lines correctly:
1) Ari and Joerg support some australian guy developing the "next-gen" freedb for two years
2) Australian guy doesn't want to release it as open/free for freedb (or all three?)
3) Ari and Joerg have either been suckers or part of an attempt at pulling another Gracenote
4) Kaiser won't play ball, it's freedb or no db at all. He finally tires and goes to the source.
5) The play is called, Ari and Joerg leave because the gig is up.
To put it this way, I would not be surprised to see another CD database show up soon, lead by an australian and maybe with a few more anonymous employees. Either that, or they're been really gullible. Never ever trust someone who says they'll open source it "soon". If that is their true intention, they would have no problem being open about it all the way. The only reason not to is when you're pulling a bait-n-switch like here. It seems clear to me that they expected it to be open source ("not yet open source", Joerg), it wasn't ("did not seem to be kept free", Kaiser) and that tore them apart.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yeah, if you had bought the CD it would come with metadata, so that when you ripped it it would be labeled correctly. Wait...
Wikipedia is busily replicating GraceNote and IMDB, by hand, and not too well. They're using a wiki to do the job of a database. Some music types from Wikipedia should take this database and the data in Wikipedia and make something useful out of it.
Personally, I think that Wikipedia needs something like "Wikipedia Music and Movies", to which all content associated with music, movies, TV, and the people involved in the industry would be moved. More structured than Wikipedia Encyclopedia, Music and Movies would have standard database formats and slots for music and movies, indexed so that you could see all movies by some director or all songs by some musician. Wikipedia can't do that, but IMDB can.
Then Wikipedia needs "Wikipedia Atlas", a map-based system, for all those "State Route 93" entries. Wikipedia isn't spatial, and space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. An atlas system would be able to handle an endless number of "my favorite restaurant" articles. Wikipedia Travel already has something like this.
With that out of the way, Wikipedia would become more like an encyclopedia. Right now, it's drowning under the incoming cruft.
IBM's gonna be pissed.
That is all.
I thought the CD-Audio standard (redbook) included the ability to add meta-information alongside the tracks, including lyrics.
Just no one uses it commercially.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Time for a new business (sic) model. If you want to survive, eat (or die). If you want to be eaten, open source ! Viva la revolution !
Are you some RIAA member who thinks we should rebuy all of our music from iTunes or something like that?
I dont use Windows.
Do you mean CD Text?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I just wish everyone would use CD-TEXT and rid us of the necessity for cd databases. I continually wish iTunes would burn CD-TEXT as well.
When are people going to learn. Open source just does not work. The open source world is heavily skewed in favor of giving programmers most of the control over the software. In contrast, the commercial software world is more skewed towards the managers and owners. You can at least bribe the manager-types to get the software you need, whereas there is no reasoning with programmers' infantile temper tantrums.
what, foobar2000 can magically recreate the cd key from a handful of truncated mp3s you downloaded off of kazaa? I know foobar2000 is good, but not that good.
Also, more than a few CDs (including the foreign CDs mentioned) had more than one listing, each with small differences (some with large differences, such as translated song titles, or even just misspelled words), so you had to go through each one to find one that suited you.(One might argue that the choice was good, but in this case it was just annoying.)
Is offering a choice of original and translated titles more or less annoying than if they had standardised on the language you like less? Do multiple language and subtitle tracks on DVDs annoy you too?
Wow...
It's posts like these that make me wish Slashdot had a moderation option for "-1, Stupid".
Freedb, like its proprietary and commercial counterpart, cddb, is a perfectly valid and legal service which recognizes the CD in your drive and downloads information about the artist, the album, the songs, cover art and sometimes even lyrics for display within your CD player software.
It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with theft or being cheap.
-- This sig for rent.
I use it to rip CDs from the library. I'm sure a bunch of other people do, too.
This one:
11>
newage/aId10T
Post, Dumb as a
Why is this a problem? The freedb server is open source and the database is also available for download from freedb.org.
..The lag it took them to make this post? Last NIGHT I was reading about this. Pfft.
A blob field for album covers would be great too, so programs like Amarok don't have to point to Amazon.com's limited collection.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Can't. CD-TEXT does not support double byte character. IOW, no UTF-*.
And I've heard criminals can use pencils to stab people. What does your law breaking have to do with freedb?
Maybe not
Each of those hashes are (supposed to be) a completely different disc, and in the case of all these different hashes, I suspect that they're from people who got a copy "ripped" from their friend, except instead of an actual copy, the guy tooks some mp3s from kazaa and burnt a cd from them. Recipient discovered that freedb didn't have an entry for this bogus disc and made one.
Sure, sometimes. That's not always the case though. Different pressings of the same album often have different track splits, which will (obviously) give you different hashes.
Personally, I've been wishing for a long time for cddb/freedb to just die already so we can re-standardize on a system that doesn't use a collision-prone hash
How do you propose that be done? The only standard readable info on a CD is track length and splits. If two different albums have the same length/splits, they'll give you basically the same hash. What's the magic bullet? Audio fingerprinting?
with absolutely no way to deal with collisions
Huh? Like the little pop-up box that tells you the albums it matched, so you can pick the right one?
Haida Manga
freedb has sucked almost since it's inception. Multiple entries for the same album, hard to do Various Artist albums, lots of misspellings and mistakes, and no way to ""fix" the problems.
I really hope people take this opportunity to check out Musicbrainz, a MUCH nicer alternative. It's (mostly) open source, runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Also, it's community moderated like Wikipedia, and it has loads of information about releases, something which was nonexistent on freedb.
It's times like this that I wonder why more commercial discs don't include CD-Text, and why more players don't support them.
FC Closer
I'll check into that real soon now.
You could always just MD5 the CD. (Replace MD5 with your favorite crypograhic hash function.) Or, even better, MD5 the individual tracks, so it would even recognize tracks on collections. As you are already reading them to rip them, it would not be much more work. The problem is that it would not be useful for just playing CDs because it would only have the song/album metadata after reading the entire track/CD. Also, in the case that the data is not already in the database, the user would not be asked to enter it until after the CD was ripped, which would be annoying. Of course, there is the even better solution of publishers actually using CD Text in the first place so the data is already on the CD.
Centralization breaks the internet.
still could use it for us in the US.. or come out with CD-TEXT2. The idea remains.
And who deals with the copyright issues for the artwork?
would a massively-replicated and -distributed p2p database of song information be a better answer to this need? why put all the eggs in one cranky-developer basket, especially when such a large number of individuals have contributed their typing to building it?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Also note that mp3, ogg, flac, and most other formats can have title, artist, etc. stored directly in the file. Music files downloaded through (illegal) file sharing would generally already be tagged, whereas freshly ripped music files need to be tagged (manually or automatically). Freedb is, obviously, more useful for ripping purchased CD's.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
I don't know much about the format itself, but if they let you store 8 bits/character, then you could just put UTF-8 data in, and it should work fine. The unofficial CD Text FAQ does say that at least the lead in area does support storing double-byte characters (for Kanji), so it seems like that still should work).
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Isn't it because it's a Philips (or Sony? I'm sure it's Philips) 'technology' and so a royalty has to be paid on every CD and CD Player built with CD Text on it, so most people don't see an advantage?
That'd be because the CDDB standards are totally braindead. Gogo musicbrainz, which sucks slightly less /o/ (although I've seen very few apps which support it D:)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I don't think the manual is big enough to fuck when you have a schlong the size of mine. Who needs porno when every chick you bang gets stretched out like Jenna Lameson?
Reminds me of NSurvey, a FOSS survey program that went commercial. I make it a point now to always download the source code for *ANY* binary download I make - as is yours and my right.
That's also why I am a little surprised that Ubuntu's source code isn't up on their download page, there isn't even a link to it.
I think the point being made was that in a world where someone can be sued and forced to remove software from distribution - either from legal rulings or the threat of litigation forcing a chioce of financial priorities - saying that the source will be released "real soon now" may mean it's never released at all. Obviously, releasing well-formated source code with documentation is better than releasing poorly formated code with no documentation, but both are better than releasing nothing at all.
I mention DVD Decrypter in the subject of the post because it's a well-known (if you're into that kind of thing) DVD ripping software that was taken down from a number of (US-hosted) sites after threat of litigation and, since it was closed-source, no further developement was made. Now, I'm not trying to compare FreeDB to DVD Decrypter, either in terms of legality or morality. Just using DVD Decrypter as an example of software which, had it been open source, could still be under developement but because the source code wasn't being released is now "lost forver." (Of course, in actually, it's not that hard to find a download of the final released version of DVD Decrypter, but it would have been nice if the code was out there for other people to continue improving.)
Again, I'm not trying to compare FreeDB to DVD Decrypter. Just providing an example for the parent's point that you never know how some court ruling or sue-happy lawfirm is going to affect what's out there. I'm not even trying to say FreeDB *should* post every line of code currently written - I can understand why the author wouldn't want that. At the same time, I can understand why the GP has an attitude of "all-or-nothing" in terms of calling something 'open source.'
-Trillian
Nice plan, but it won't work because CD-Audio is too error-prone to have a high confidence of getting the same bitstream twice off different copies of the same CD, or indeed off the same CD played in a different player.
The patent's bound to wear off sooner or later, though.
I only ever managed to get my homemade perl freedb client to work once. Tried it with a different disc and it went Tango Uniform. It's a shame, but maybe the replacement -- because there will be a replacement -- will have a better hashing scheme. Preferably still generated from the TOC alone, so as to make it quicker to calculate.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I wouldn't label less than 100 lines of script and apache config file contents worthy of over two years of development...
If he publishes the real code to his "freedb2" then he'll be worthy of respect. Until then...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Quote from one of the freedb authors:
As far as I can see, freedb2 is not distributing the database dump, which was licensed under the GPL. I do not like to see comments on Slashdot promoting a project that violates the GPL. freedb2 has used the data provided under the GPL by freedb and is not giving anything back (yet?).
To be clear about why freedb2 violates the GPL, I will point out that the GPL requires every distributor to make the source code (plain text database dump) available "from the same place" as the binaries (the database used by freedb2). So simply adding references to the original freedb mirros would not be sufficient in this case, especially because these CD databases evolve over time so it is likely that freedb and freedb2 could contain different data. For reference, see this section of the GPL FAQ.
I have contributed a large number of CDs to the freedb database (including corrections to existing entries). I have done it because I knew that the database was licensed under the GPL and could not be taken away from the users (note that I am talking about the database, not the programs used for accessing it). I was using the old XMCD before the database was taken over by what became Gracenote. I was very happy to see freedb emerging, promoting freedom as one of its core values. That's why I contributed my CDs to this free database.
Unless the freedb2 developer (who seems to be responsible for the problems with freedb) complies with the GPL and offers a complete dump of the database, I will discourage anybody from using freedb2.
(Yep, people still do that.)
Sorry to have to break it to you, sonny, but it's really just you.
Because the record companies don't want you doing anything with your CD other than playing it in a vanilla, dumb CD-player thank you very much.
Actualy, you can reliably checksum the audio data on redbook.. you do need to do a little more work.. but this could easily be automated.
Unfortunately, I have not found a linux implementation of this yet.
http://www.accuraterip.com/
I understand that whenever a free resource dies, it is a time of lamentation. However, what I do not understand is why this is such a big deal. Are people really that lazy that they cannot be bothered to type in song titles when ripping CDs? I've ripped hundreds and have found most of freedb's responses to be wrong (using CDex). Granted, I own a lot of non-English CDs, but even when I rip English CDs, I prefer to input my own metainformation in. It's just one more minute of time, guys!
would you mind sending SPAM to this email address: runbeth@yahoo.com
Surely Musicbrainz is a viable replacement?
I forgot to mention it in the OP, but I believe a sufficiently small copy (say 200x200) would constitute fair use while still being recognizable.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm confused. By thieves, you mean Gracenote, right? The ones who took the database contributed with the understanding that it would be open and free, then monetized it? The ones CDDB replaced?
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Maybe, with this change, and other changes such as individual track downloads and other media mp3 players, DVD-Audio, etc., it's time for something better than a CD-Audio database? Aren't all the tools available now to recognise the actual songs' "fingerprints"? Couldn't a more flexible database, with lyrics etc. be built with that technology?
Who says some developers can't get together and just start "www.reallyfreedb.org?" We can download July version of the dataase, host the software, and continue on as if nothing happened. Anyone interested?
The essential part about all this is the collaboratively filtered and collected data, right? And that is out in the wild and still available as a package, correct? ...Mmmmh... Coming to think of it ... does anyone know the mean load of late freedb?
Copy, Fork, Install, Build a cool website, have yourself a fresh OSS project. No big deal.
Ideal for anyone who needs to make themselves a name as DB admin / web services expert.
Anyway, a handfull of weeks and we'll have an alternative and freedb will be history (no pun intened).
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Hmm I looked at the URLs you provided but all I could find were some CREATE TABLE statements and some scripts to do conversion between different character encodings.
As far as I understand we're talking about a full FreeDB server here, something that is able to answer requests and accept new submissions. I haven't seen any such code!
There is no need to comment your source code in fancy HTML pages. We can read pure source. Just put up a tarball with the source online and we'll see what you did in the last two years.
Need a Wiki? Check out DokuWiki
I don't understand. You claim that you'll release the source code to the public, yet when the issue came to a head and the two main freedb devs essentially walked away from years of (free) work, you just sat by and watched? We could have avoided all of this mess if you'd even just given them the code and said, "Here, this is the source, this is the license, could you please hold off on distributing it until after I've documented it?" Then they'd at least be able to open it up to the public if you were to get hit by a bus or something in the interim.
/. with promises you should have kept a year ago. Why should any of us trust you, when you could have prevented all of this?
But you didn't do that. And now you're shilling your code on
You likely have a few rips of material that you didn't use your middle class disposible income to purchase, too.
I was just, kinda, making sure the stench of hypocrisy wasn't getting too rank around here.
Here's your blunt crayon, dude.
No, but it could(emphasis on could, it hasn't been updated for foobar 0.9, and 0.8 is showing its age) turn a cd of badly tagged mp3s from a bad torrent site into proper naming, no cd required.
Admittedly thats not much or anything for the grandparent to bitch about, but I'm sure someone could spin an IP lawsuit off of it.
I recently upgraded to 0.9 and its one of the plugins I miss the most, it made fixing tags as easy as clicking ~4 things and being done with it.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Back before Gracenote was Gracenote, I entered 650 CD's in. I kept track of how many pre-existing entries were perfect, how many had minor typos, and how many were so screwed up it required a lot of work. And there were a few CD's that weren't in the database.
From memory, of those discs that were in the database, it was about 1/4 perfect, and about 3/8 each typo'd or 'required substantial fixing'.
So no, it isn't total, utter shit. It was frustrating, however, to see all those sloppy people and those sloppy programs (Windows, invariably). Even more frustrating was when the collaborative effort was stolen for personal gain by the fucks who turned it into Gracenote. I no longer submit corrections (I use it only because my programs won't let me use anything else).
I would LOVE a free (completely open soure, completely open data) version, especially if there were a mechanism to avoid the Wikipedia effect--trolls, children, and incompetents having the right to screw it up. Perhaps some sort of multiple version download with voting on each and selectable thresholds. For that I'd find alternate programs or get my current ones to work with something new.
I found it's pretty common for CD drives to not return bit-identical results when ripping the exact same CD. I've got several drives, and they will not all result in matching MD5 sum output. I forget the details, but one drive for example would add a few extra 0 bytes onto the front of the CD. And that's without taking into account the possibility of scratches or differences between different copies of the same album. It's a nice idea, keeping the MD5 sum, but would probably just result in huge numbers of duplicate entries.
That very page you linked from GNU also says this:
The CD info is factual public-domain data, and anyone's added comments/notes are copyrighted to their authors. The freedb software has translated it into another form, which doesn't give them any ownership rights, and ergo they can't impose GPL on it.
Database dumps are NOT "source code" no matter what the freedb guys say. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.
The song titles are copyrighted as well as the music.
Therefore, transmitting the song titles via the internet (ie. through FreeBD) is a copyright violation.
So there!
> The song titles are copyrighted as well as the music.
> Therefore, transmitting the song titles via the internet (ie. through FreeBD) is a copyright violation.
> So there!
You can't copyright song titles.
So there there! (non-obiligatory "dumbass" omitted)
As stated by the subject, the bosses are just as human as the other team members. So, while it can be hoped that being capable of diplomacy, tact and some ego control helps one to become a boss, it does not guarantee that they can't get stubborn and irrational as well every now and then.
Regarding the closed-source projects, I'd assume that most of the ones that were damaged sufficiently by personnel conflicts would do so inside the walls of a company, without much publicity. After all, not all projects get hyped much until they have progressed moderately far, whether they are open or closed source.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
Care to tell how I'm supposed to be a thief, while I'm listening for a CD chosen from my collection of a couple of hundred or so audio CDs I've bought since 1991 and player application uses the database to display track/artist information?
(Sure, I could just look at the track number and compare it to the listing contained at the back of the CD. But why not use the technology, when it's available.)
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
well, it's just blue-sky thinking - an example of one possible feature that could have been useful. perhaps a straightforward checksum of tracks, with fuzzy best-matching searches would do the trick. maybe not. Trogre suggests in this thread that a very small cover graphic would be good.
Of course, I've not really looked into it - there may be technical limitations to the CDDb format the freedb has to adhere to...
--
Having looked at what constitutes freedb I can honestly say there is plenty of opportunity for improvement.
Staying compatible with the current protocol isn't difficult, and moving it forward to something more recent would not be difficult. It is an exceptionally easy and straightforward process.
The issue I would have with the cover-art is copyright issues. To resolve that would require licensing arrangements with the music publishers. Not fun, and not going to happen for a free database.
I seriously considered what it would take to run a freedb server in the last few days.
freedb consists of hundreds of thousands of files, it isn't a database per say. (the rock folder contains 574,664 files each only a couple K in size. )
In the end an uncompressed archive is 3,513,815,040 bytes. 3.5Gigs. I don't have easy access to that kind of space on a server on the internet. (ok, I might, but that would require negotiating with my boss. Don't think they are up for it. No clue what the actual bandwidth hit is for freedb)
It can be used just fine with mp3s. There are many tagging apps that support looking up info for mp3/ogg/etc. files from freedb. Off the top of my head, Tag&Rename does it, as do the various freedb plugins for Foobar2000. So while I agree that the grandparent was fairly offbase, saying freedb is useless without a CD is incorrect.