Freedb

Last updated

Freedb was a database of user-submitted compact disc track listings, [1] where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculated a hash function from the CD table of contents and used it as a disc ID to query the database. If the disc was in the database, the client was able to retrieve and display the artist, album title, track list and some additional information.

Contents

Freedb was launched in 2001 based on the CDDB (Compact Disc DataBase) after it had been changed to a proprietary license and renamed "Gracenote". [2] As of 24 April 2006, the Freedb database held just under 2,000,000 CDs. [3] As of 2007, MusicBrainz – a project with similar goals – had a Freedb gateway that allowed access to their own database. [4] The Freedb gateway was shut down on March 18, 2019. [5]

In 2020, Freedb was shut down by Magix, a German company that had acquired it in 2006.

History

The original software behind CDDB was released under the GNU General Public License, and many people submitted CD information thinking the service would also remain free. The license was later changed, however, and some programmers complained that the new license included certain terms that they couldn't accept: if one wanted to access CDDB, one was not allowed to access any other CDDB-like database (such as Freedb), and any programs using a CDDB lookup had to display a CDDB logo while performing the lookup. [6]

In March 2001, CDDB, now owned by Gracenote, banned all unlicensed applications from accessing their database. New licenses for CDDB1 (the original version of CDDB) were no longer available, since Gracenote wanted to force programmers to switch to CDDB2 (a new version incompatible with CDDB1 and hence with Freedb). [6] The license change motivated the Freedb project, which is intended to remain free.

In a 2006 interview with Wired, CDDB co-creator Steve Scherf pushed back against criticism that with the license change, Gracenote had privatized a public good created by the work of unpaid volunteers, noting that the data submitted to CDDB before the license remained available for download on freedb, and arguing that the stagnation of freedb at that point showed that "the focus and dedication required for CDDB to grow could not be found in a community effort". [7]

Because it inherited CDDB's limitations, [8] [9] there is no data field in the Freedb database for composer. This limits its usefulness for classical music CDs. Furthermore, CDs in a series are often introduced in the database by different people, resulting in inconsistent spelling and naming conventions across discs.

Freedb was used primarily by media players, cataloguers, audio taggers and CD ripper software. As of version 6 of the Freedb protocol, Freedb accepted and returned UTF-8 data.

Magix acquired Freedb in 2006. [10] MusicBrainz – a project with similar goals – released a Freedb gateway in 2007, allowing users to harvest information from the MusicBrainz database rather than Freedb. [4] This service was shuttered in 2019. [11] A 2011 review observed that "unlike the flat file database structure of freedb.org, MusicBrainz is structured as a relational database, which has allowed MusicBrainz to expand its scope." [1]

In June 2020, Freedb.org went offline (after its impending shutdown had been announced in March 2020). [2] Asked by Heise News about the reasons for the service's demise, Magix stated that the updates required by a changing legal and technical environment had made it uneconomical to maintain. [2] An expert quoted by Heise ruled out server costs as the reason, observing that a single request to the service amounted to just around five kilobytes of transferred data. [2]

gnudb.org, short for 'Global Network Universal Database,' has continued to provide the Freedb.org database after Freedb.org was shut down. [12]

Client software

Further Freedb aware applications include:

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MusicBrainz</span> Online music metadata database

MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata storehouse to become a structured online database for music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CD ripper</span> Software that convert tracks on a Compact Disc to standard computer sound files

A CD ripper, CD grabber, or CD extractor is software that rips raw digital audio in Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) format tracks on a compact disc to standard computer sound files, such as WAV or MP3.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">K3b</span> Optical disc authoring software

K3b is a CD, DVD and Blu-ray authoring application by KDE for Unix-like computer operating systems. It provides a graphical user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD/DVD, as well as more advanced tasks such as burning eMoviX CD/DVDs. It can also perform direct disc-to-disc copies. The program has many default settings which can be customized by more experienced users. The actual disc recording in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord or cdrkit, cdrdao, and growisofs. As of version 1.0, K3b features a built-in DVD ripper.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CDex</span> CD ripper

CDex is a free software package for Digital Audio Extraction from Audio CD and audio format conversion for Microsoft Windows. It converts CDDA tracks from a CD to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis. CDex was previously released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL); however, although the website claims that this is still the case, no source code has been released since 2005. It was originally written by Albert L. Faber, and is developed and maintained by Georgy Berdyshev. Recent versions of the software may be compromised and a security threat.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copy Control</span>

Copy Control was the generic name of a copy prevention system, used from 2001 until 2006 on several digital audio disc releases by EMI Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment in several regions. It should not be confused with the CopyControl computer software copy protection system introduced by Microcosm Ltd in 1989.

AMG LASSO is a media recognition service launched by the All Media Guide in 2004. The LASSO service automatically recognizes CDs, DVDs, and digital audio files in formats such as MP3, WMA, and others. The service uses CD table of contents (ToC), DVD ToC, and acoustic fingerprint based recognition to recognize media. LASSO is available in versions for PCs and embedded devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AnyDVD</span> DVD ripping software

AnyDVD is a device driver for Microsoft Windows which allows decryption of DVDs on the fly, as well as targeted removal of copy preventions and user operation prohibitions (UOPs). With an upgrade, it will also do the same for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. The AnyDVD program runs in the background, making discs unrestricted and region-free. In addition to removing digital restrictions, AnyDVD will also defeat Macrovision analog copy prevention. Analog prevention distorts the video signal to prevent high quality copying from the output. AnyDVD is also able to remove copy-prevention from audio CDs.

AmpliFIND is an acoustic fingerprinting service and a software development kit developed by the US company MusicIP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gracenote</span> American metadata company

Gracenote, Inc. is a company and service that provides music, video, and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and companies worldwide. Formerly CDDB, Gracenote maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs and vinyl records. From 2008 to 2014, it was owned by Sony, later sold to Tribune Media, and has been owned since 2017 by Nielsen Holdings. In 2019, Nielsen Holdings announced plans to split into two separate publicly traded companies, Nielsen Global Connect and Nielsen Global Media. In October 2022, Nielsen Holdings, including the Gracenote subsidiary was acquired by a private equity consortium.

Lala was an online music store created by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bill Nguyen. The service allowed members to legally create online shareable "playlists" of their own uploaded music which could play full length songs for other registered Lala members, purchase MP3s, stream music on a one-time basis or as inexpensively purchased "web songs," buy new CDs from the Lala store, leave blurbs on other members' pages, and participate in the community forums. Lala contracted with major labels and offered a large catalog of albums to stream or purchase. Their home page claimed over 8 million licensed songs available.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audiograbber</span>

Audiograbber is a proprietary freeware CD audio extractor/converter program for Microsoft Windows. It was one of the first programs in the genre to become popular. The data extraction algorithm was designed by Jackie Franck and was included in the Xing Technology software package Xing Audio Catalyst in the mid-1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brasero (software)</span> Open-source disc-burning GUI front-end

Brasero is a free and open-source disc-burning program for Unix-like operating systems, it serves as a graphical front-end to cdrtools, cdrskin, growisofs, and (optionally) libburn. Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asunder (software)</span> Free and open-source graphical audio CD ripper program for Unix-like systems

Asunder is a free and open-source graphical audio CD ripper program for Unix-like systems. It doesn't have dependencies to the GNOME libraries or libraries of other desktop environments. It functions as a front-end for cdparanoia.

<i>Minidisc</i> (album) 1998 studio album by Gescom

Minidisc is the first album by Gescom. The album was originally only released in MiniDisc format, but was later pressed to CD. In addition, the album has been released on bleep.com. The personnel for this album were Sean Booth and Rob Brown, and Russell Haswell.

CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for software applications to look up audio CD information over the Internet. This is performed by a client which calculates a (nearly) unique disc ID and then queries the database. As a result, the client is able to display the artist name, CD title, track list and some additional information. CDDB is a licensed trademark of Gracenote, Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CD-ROM</span> Pre-pressed compact disc containing computer data

A CD-ROM is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data is only usable on a computer.

Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation is a manufacturer of CDs, DVDs, UMDs, and Blu-ray Discs. The company has many plants worldwide. Although it primarily services Sony Music Entertainment-owned record labels, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, and Sony Interactive Entertainment, it also manufactures discs for other labels, home entertainment distributors, and video game publishers.

Music information company Gracenote changed its database terms to closed-source in 2001. This caused some controversy because Gracenote's ancestor, CDDB, had previously said its database was released under the GPL.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Puddletag</span> Tag editor for Unix-like operating systems

Puddletag is a graphical audio file metadata editor ("tagger") for Unix-like operating systems.

References

  1. 1 2 Stutzbach, Alisa Rata (2011). "Review of MusicBrainz". Notes. 68 (1): 147–151. ISSN   0027-4380.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Haas, Karl-Gerhard (2020-06-23). "CD-Datenbanken: freedb ist tot, es leben die Alternativen!". heise online (in German). Retrieved 2023-12-10.
  3. ↑ joerg (2006-04-24). "Massive duplicate cleanup completed". freedb. Archived from the original on 2006-05-10. Retrieved 2006-05-09.
  4. 1 2 Kaye, Robert (2007-06-25). "FreeDB → MusicBrainz gateway now available!". MusicBrainz. Retrieved 2007-07-10.
  5. ↑ "Freedb gateway: End of life notice, March 18, 2019". MetaBrainz Blog. 2018-09-18. Retrieved 2020-02-12.
  6. 1 2 "Why freedb.org?". freedb. Archived from the original on 2006-07-05. Retrieved 2006-05-09.
  7. ↑ Van Buskirk, Eliot (2006-11-13). "Gracenote Defends Its Evolution". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2023-12-10.
  8. ↑ "Tips on using CD Trustee - Classical music". CD Trustee. Sane Soft, LLC. Archived from the original on 2008-06-06.
  9. ↑ Brown, Stan (2016-12-18). "Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music (and Non-Classical Too)". Oak Road Systems.
  10. ↑ kaiser (2006-10-04). "[MAGIX acquires] freedb.org". freedb. Archived from the original on 2007-03-03. Retrieved 2006-10-05.
  11. ↑ "Freedb gateway: End of life notice, March 18, 2019". 18 September 2018.
  12. ↑ "A new home for the freedb.org database to make sure it stays free" . Retrieved 2020-07-13. Now 14 years later we have seen that Magix the owner of freedb.org has decided to take the cddb service on freedb down. As we stated in 2006 on gnudb.org "A new home for the freedb.org database to make sure it stays free.", we now have to stay to our promise and do our best to make sure it is available for all the music lovers.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.