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iTunes Uncovers Musical Hoax
holy_calamity writes "The reliance by iTunes on the CDDB has burst open a musical fraud in the usually staid world of classical piano. Albums by the much vaunted British pianist Joyce Hatto, who died in June 2006, are identified by the iTunes player as belonging to other performers. A more scientific analysis by an audio remastering firm has found that none of Hatto's works appear to be hers. Her husband, who produced all her albums, says he 'cannot explain' the similarities."
From the unsourced Wikipedia article:
She stopped playing in public in the 1970s, having never attained much prominence as an artist. The retired critic James Methuen-Campbell heard two of her recitals in London's Wigmore Hall and recalls a pianist with an efficient and careful technique, but with an inability to convey the overall conception of a major work. Her approach, in his opinion, concentrated on detail.
iTunes didn't catch it, CDDB did.
Actually, neither iTunes nor CDDB caught it. The person who put the CD in caught it, when he realized that the data CDDB/iTunes returned wasn't for the CD he'd put in, but was close enough in content that he was intrigued enough to do an a/b comparison.
I'm betting a bunch of other people saw the same thing, and either didn't correct it, or said "huh" and just "corrected" the artist's name based on what they thought it was supposed to be, assuming the data in CDDB was wrong.
So kudos to the guy who noticed!
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.
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make install -not war