Slashdot Mirror
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."
That is the sound of the world's smallest violin playing.
...Hayden other recordings. I say, Bach to the source to find out what is going on! I won't be Chopin at I-Tunes anymore.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
...this is /.
The majority understand what CDDB is...if nothing else, you should at least be able to figure out what it STANDS for. Just to help you out, I'll break it down for you:
CD. DB.
Need further assistance?
Living With a Nerd
I can see the CDs being rips, but didn't she play publicly? Be kinda hard to fake that :)
As for the husband, either he recorded her playing in a studio, or he didn't. I don't see how you can mistake that and claim "I dunno how this happened."
Basically he's been busted and he's lying to save his ass.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This isn't specific to iTunes at all. There are lots of players and applications that take advantage of CDDB. The first impression you get from the article is that Apple somehow managed to catch a fraud, while that isn't the truth at all.
do you know squarepusher?
I love when things like this come out after the guilty party has passed on. Holding up a scam with your very last breath takes dedication, and the mental image of Ms Hatto laughing pleasantly and flipping sweary fingwer gestures from the great beyond comforts me immensely.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
So if her recordings were so masterful, and they were identical to other recordings, then why didn't the critics recognize the similarity for so long?
This confirms my belief that music critics are mostly full of shit. If those recordings were so good, then the artists she copied from were obviously superb. However, one was apparently a very obscure Japanese pianist, so his brilliance wasn't recognized, and since no-one noticed the copy for so long, the others can't have been very prominent either.
"iTunes Uncovers Musical Hoax"
It's become self-aware!!
Frankly, I blame the RIAA for going after her remixes. Talk about a vendetta. A proper Slashdot comment would rattle on about how these poor folks are suing a dead woman.
Really, the two of them were the biggest fans of the artists whose work they fair-used. They did this as an homage. Yeah. That's the ticket.
How are we supposed to RTFA when we dont know what "RTFA" stands for?
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.
--
make install -not war
The whole Hatto hoax is an internet phenomenon, specifically a usenet phenomenon. Hadn't there been two shills on the group, playing good cop, bad cop and drawing other bystanders into the game, this would not have happened.
Before those Hatto recordings were on the radar of the professional reviewing magazines in the UK, the entire promotion for these CDs was done on rec.music.classical recordings by the two shills and on the website of a CD retailer with a close affiliation to the record producers. People were praising the CDs into the sky and the exclusive retailer is a regular on the newsgroup, too.
This thing had SCAM written all over it, but overcoming groupthink in the presence of two shills is difficult. Godwin's law,you know.
It's hilarious to see the two shills in action: The one is a loud, foulmouthed ex-classical-music-producer from Canada and the other one an English gentleman with impeccable style, manners and a deep love for classical music. What they staged was drama on a very high level, flaming residents into the ground at the slightest hint of a suspicion as to the authenticity of the recordings. Anything from Jew to Nazi was good enough to be hurled at the detractors of the holy trinity of Hatto, Barrington-Coup and Music.
They almost murdered me when I told the group that the whole thing was a total fake, based on all the oddities that I named.