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."

Comments

Re:Nothing to see?

[haroldag]

Actually, there is some code out there: http://asmith.id.au/mod_libpq.html

Re:Damn.

[Otter]

Freedb is a knockoff of cddb, so I'd imagine that the grandknockoff is going to continue with the same protocol.

freedb2.org compatibility

[Horar]

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.

Re:freedb2.org compatibility

[llefler]

You can also pull the July 1 2006 version directly from freedb. Along with the source for the current release of the server, a link to sourceforge for the unstable code, and some sample clients in various languages. I'm pulling a copy from one of the mirrors right now, and I'm sure others are doing the same.

Re:no honor amongst theives

[MichaelSmith]

Just stop being a bunch of cheap a-holes and BUY music that you like.

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.

Re:Damn.

[RackinFrackin]

I suspect that you are right, but I wouldn't use the word "knockoff". Freedb was more like a replacement of cddb, for when cddb was sold out from under the community that built it.

Re:no honor amongst theives

[swimin]

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.

A quick fix

[houghi]

Not sure if the following will work, but if the directory structure is the same and you only need to change the URL, you could just edit your hosts file (or do it on router level or where ever). A lot easier then to update all the different programs for the different users:
Add to your hostfile:

203.58.241.10 freedb.org

Ugly, but it might work.

Re:So....

[bcat24]

The database is still there and lookups still work. For now at least.

Time to replicate the database!

[hernick]

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!

Re:I'd just like to say,

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only person who took the effort to do a bit of investigation? For instance, 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.

Grandparent's urls are Australian, he calls the project freedb2, and there's very little source code to be found: I'm guessing that he's this Australian.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I have the utmost respect for people who donate their free time to making software for gratis, but when that developer pledges (of sorts) to make a replacement to an OSS product, gets support from the developers of the product being replaced (was that support monetary?), and refuses to free that code, which in turn contributes to toppling another (well known and widely depended on -- yes, I know freedb still works, but still) project, I am slightly angered, to say the least.

And what stops him from now never opening that code? Replacing a FOSS product with simply a gratis product is a net loss, from where I'm standing.

Re:I'd just like to say,

[binkzz]

He is the Aussie; from one of the original developers:

"freedb2 is the development project that played a big role in the demise of freedb. That the developer is advertising it here now, apparently trying to profit from what he caused is immoral in my opinion.
Additionally, using the name freedb2.org is stealing freedb's name. Furthermore horar has not yet released source code or a database dump, so as of this moment, freedb2 is a closed source project, which violates the GPL under which the database archives are released. Even if the GPL may not be enforceable in this case, not releasing a database dump is certainly morally wrong."

Re:Gullible?

[Horar]

I am both "the Australian guy" and the author and host of http://freedb2.org./ I sincerely hope that in future you will spend a bit more time joining the dots before jumping to such sensational conclusions.

In the meantime, I invite you to enjoy http://freedb2.org/ and browse as much of the source code as I have had time to document and post on http://asmith.id.au/freedb.html and http://asmith.id.au/mod_libpq.html

Re:I'd just like to say,

[gnosygnus]

someone mod parent up. horar/freedb2's motives are not in full disclosure. hopefully not bad etiquette to post links to digg, but the comments are worth reading.

source of parent post: http://digg.com/software/freedb_s_future_uncertain
more comments on freedb: http://www.digg.com/linux_unix/freedb_is_closing_d own

at any rate, there seems to be more to horar's involvement than originally stated.

Re:Good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't. CD-TEXT does not support double byte character. IOW, no UTF-*.

freedb has sucked for ages, though...

[yoasif]

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.

Re:Ahhh, those were the times

[andersa]

Are you sure you were not really using musicbrainz? I don't think freedb is able to do this.

Re:I'd just like to say,

[Anonumous Coward]

Please do your homework. The freedb database dump is released under the GPL with the following addendum:

For purposes of interpreting the GPL in connection with this work: The
database is distributed in the form of plain text files. These
will generally be processed into to another form. The text form should
be considered "source code" and the other form should be considered a
"compiled program".

This means, the moment you publish the database in any other format than a dump (e.g. through another front end), you must publish a dump of your own. If freedb2.org is using any part of freedb.org's database, it is currently infringing freedb.org's copyrights.

Re:Get what you paid for?

[megari]

It seems like there were three people on the project, and two of them wanted to take it non-free, one didn't

This is not true. He may have misunderstood us despite our repeated assertions that we have no intention of endangering freedb's freeness. We simply wanted to get things worked out so that all the requirements for freeness and other issues would be fulfilled so that everyone would be happy. He did something unexpected and unilateral while there was an effort to fix things which made us feel he didn't feel like discussing his actions with everyone anymore. This combined with all of the difficulties and the situation being effectively deadlocked eventually led into the decision of both of us leaving. Now having slept on it, I am not sure about whether it was right for me to feel that I couldn't continue with the person left. It is strange how one finds oneself blaming oneself over hastiness even though the decision took three days to make when faced with the need to make one. I'll see how things turn out. Things may or may not get well again. In any case, see this. It may help clear things out a little bit as it contains input from everyone involved. Also, the full front page of freedb.org contains some of our reasoning. The person left removed our response to his allegation that we wanted to make the project less free giving a somewhat distorted image of us to the general public, which has prompted me to make this response to make sure that misinformation doesn't turn into something everyone regards as the undisputed truth.