Sony to Buy Gracenote

Ian Lamont writes "Sony is buying Gracenote for $260 million. Sony will use Gracenote's online music database in its own digital content and devices, but Gracenote will operate separately and keep its own management. It's an interesting move, because many other entertainment companies and services depend on the Gracenote database, including iTunes, Yahoo, Winamp, and even the onboard stereo system used in some new Cadillacs. Gracenote has been criticized for turning the once-open CDDB project into a 'quagmire of heavy contracts, licensing fees, forced user registration and anti-competition clauses.'"

Comments

You've Got It All Wrong!

[eldavojohn]

Gracenote has been criticized for turning the once open CDDB project into a 'quagmire of heavy contracts, licensing fees, forced user registration and anti-competition clauses.' No no, you've got it all wrong! Sony's changing all that! I just installed a client that they started hosting that allows me to access the compact disc database. No contract, no licensing, no registration, just had to run a simple file called 'sony-mp3-finder-RIAA-notifying-kernel-rootkit.exe.'

Seriously, where does all this distrust and hate for Sony come from?

Re:You've Got It All Wrong!

[allcar]

Show me a technology where they did not try to seek to tie people into their proprietary solution - Betamax, Memory Stick, MiniDisc, UMD, BlueRay, to name just a few.

Re:You've Got It All Wrong!

[dakameleon]

Walkman. Discman. Arguably both Sony's most successful consumer electronics products.

Re:You've Got It All Wrong!

[Arivia]

The PS3 (with the exception of Blu-Ray) is pretty open. It's all Bluetooth/USB (including support for the plug and play standard for keyboards, mice, USB keys, external hard disks, and so on). The ones with MemoryStick slots don't care if you use it or not - you are free to do things that you would do with external storage (backing up game saves, copying media, and copying firmware updates) on USB keys, MemorySticks, SD cards, or whatever, depending upon your fancy. The only case in which it overtly favors something proprietary is that certain features (DVD upscaling, for example) are limited or not available unless you're using the HDMI port for video. However, it doesn't complain if you simply switch out for a HDMI to DVI cable and run audio on RCA cables.

In fact, it's downright weird to find proprietary things on the PS3 - GHIII's proprietary wireless dongles just make no sense in the context of how the system operates.

Re:You've Got It All Wrong!

[sm62704]

Sure they apologized

So did Kevin Mitnick, but he still went to prison. Why didn't anybody go to prison for XCP (alternate less serious link)?

freedb

[Gothmolly]

What is this CDDB you speak of? Some crufty, proprietary version of freedb? I'm sorry, how is this relevant again?

Re:freedb

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah sure, until the current administrators of FreeDB sell out as Ti Kan and Steve Scherf did, and another grubby little company tells lies about it's "open" intentions then locks out the existing users by changing formats and switching to a draconian license.

If you want to protect something like FreeDB from sell outs you need to

1) Ensure that the data format and service protocol is wide WIDE open (XML, standard query structures), but the license prohibits switching the service protocol to the same data set if you fork. In other words, if you fork you have a backwards commitment to the established collective.

2) Have a poisoning proof distributed database synchronisation network that makes sure the actual data has *multiple* owners and a licence that allows any of the multiple owners to fork. With enough active maintainers a cohesive effect will keep them all working to expand a common data set.

Any monolithic data set maintained by one body/org is prone to weasels selling it out.

Re:freedb

[hondo77]

What is this CDDB you speak of? Some crufty, proprietary version of freedb? I'm sorry, how is this relevant again? <realitycheck>It's relevant because most of us are using iTunes.</realitycheck>

Re:freedb

[yoasif]

http://musicbrainz.org/ The data is either public domain or covered under Creative Commons. I believe the software is GPL. Definitely a better alternative to CDDB and freedb.

Re:SONY Loves Closed, Proprietary Systems

[njfuzzy]

Losses like BluRay, you mean?

Musicbrainz

[AceJohnny]

Use MusicBrainz. All the cool kids are doing it!

Seriously. Musicbrainz was created after the CDDB fiasco (and FreeDB had its own share of problems). It operates under a non-profit organization to guarantee its freedom.
And on that feature bullet-point list, they add an API to recognize what that "Unknown Artist - Unknown Title.mp3" file you have.

Re:Musicbrainz

[himself]

So how can I tell iTunes to use it?

      I already have tens of GB of MP3s in iTunes that I burned from CDs myself -- and iTunes automatically looks up the tags in CDDB. I see that I can short-circuit that lookup and manually tag all the files myself via unchecking the "Look up CD names from the Internet?" option in the Advanced pane of the preferences, but is there a tool (e.g., an AppleScript) that'll update my Library from Musicbrainz or FreeDB or whatever?

Re:Musicbrainz

[artels]

but is there a tool (e.g., an AppleScript) that'll update my Library from Musicbrainz or FreeDB or whatever? http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardTagger
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/FreeDBGateway

Re:Musicbrainz

[Zanth_]

The comments regarding Picardtagger are good but if you want something automatic use ieatbrainz:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ieatbrainz/

Re:SONY Loves Closed, Proprietary Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Blue-ray's hardly a win, yet. Sure, they beat HD-DVD. Good for them.

Then prices on Blue-ray shot up (gee, who'd have ever expected that to happen), early adopters have discovered that their expensive players can't play new Blue-ray discs thanks to Sony continuing to muck with the spec, leaving the PS3 the only future-proof Blue-ray player.

But thanks to Sony purposely crippling the PS3 in order to try and leverage what they viewed as their console monopoly into winning the HD format war, they lost out to Nintendo and Microsoft. Every game release that has a PS3 version and an XBox360 version is better on the XBox360, without fail. Check the reviews.

As an added bonus to Sony, just when they were starting to get close to actually making money on the PS3, the US economy started to collapse. Since Sony is a Japanese company which is based in yen, the falling US dollar is causing them to lose even more on every US sale than they were before. The US won't be seeing a price cut until the dollar stops its nosedive. The way the US economy is going, Sony may have to actually increase prices.

They did manage to "win" the Blue-ray war. They won by losing their strength in the console market, and they won just in time to have the US economy collapse so that they can no longer count on sales there.

To top it all off, the war they "won" wasn't really worth winning. HDTV adoption is picking up, but it's still a trifling fraction of the viewing population. Blue-ray became more expensive. DVD is good enough: Blue-ray won a meaningless war, at a great cost for Sony.

Blue-ray's victory is meaningless.

Re:SONY Loves Closed, Proprietary Systems

[R2.0]

Yes, Sony finally won one of their format wars. Finally, after years of failing to achieve market dominance, they have a success.

Now what?

They have lots of experience making money with consumer electronics that leverage open formats - Walkman, Discman, and the metric assloads of VHS and DVD players they have sold. They have ZERO experience leveraging a market dominant position into profit.

Their attitude seems to have been "We make X dollars with Y percent of the market. So we will make X*(1/Y) dollars with 100% of the market." They ignore the case where the market with open standards is (1/Y) times BIGGER than the whole market with proprietary standards.

They are like the ass who goes out with the gang and always orders the personal pizza because they want it just the way they want, even though no one else wants it that way. He doesn't see that if he had pitched in he could have gotten a slice of the giant sized pie and still eaten more for less money than he paid for the pie that is "all his."

Re:SHIT!!!

[MadKeithV]

Can't you just redirect the gracenote CDDB URLs in your hosts file, to the FreeDB ones?
(See Point 4 here. )

CDDB's Missing Features

[joe_n_bloe]

Do you mean the version of FreeDB that is missing the spelling errors and the duplicates?