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Freedb.org Returns to Life

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-to-see-them-back dept.

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."

8 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Freedb2? by OverlordQ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And what's going to happen to Freedb2 (site that one of original founders forked from Freedb) then?

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
    1. Re:Freedb2? by Jay+Carlson · · Score: 5, Interesting

      http://freedb2.org/ continues to thrive and grow and has been very well supported.

      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.

  2. Man, this takes me back... by bennomatic · · Score: 2, Interesting
    One of the first sites I was asked to design was a CD trading system which never went anywhere. The founders were too cheap to license a database or build a system to grow one organically, but they wanted names of all of the artists, albums and song titles that people owned on the CDs they wanted to trade.

    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.

    --
    The CB App. What's your 20?
  3. Thanks, Michael by MikeO · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hats off to Michael Kaiser for being the caretaker of freedb for the past 7+ years and remaining true to the community spirit the service represents.

    Many digital music collections, mine included, owe a lot to freedb.

    1. Re:Thanks, Michael by Teresita · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I made all my CDs into MP3s at 256 kbps (about six LPs per data CD, and I can't hear the difference when its encoded above that). Freedb saved me from getting carpal tunnel. But now I don't need it and never will again, because I haven't bought a CD since 1999 (except for Melissa auf der Maur, but I support her art). There's a little thing called USENET. Heinlein would say, "It's raining soup, get a bucket."

  4. Re:MusicBrainz is superior to FreeDB by Jeffrey+Baker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Oh no! They don't support _genre_! Call the metadata police!

    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.

  5. Re:Grip? by Trongy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is Grip still creating invalid ogg files by default (with ID3 tags in the header)?

  6. Re:MusicBrainz is superior to FreeDB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I agree with you on the 'genre' field. But what I'd like to see is support for the id3v2 'composer', 'conductor', and 'lead performer(s)' fields.