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FreeDB Is Shutting Down

freedb.org

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Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#11

Post by hamiltont »

Disclaimer: I know nothing about what led to this situation

Found it a bit sad to see this notice followed by a recent news headline saying the project was guaranteed to continue:

  Continuation of the free database guaranteed

  With the acquisition of the www.freedb.org domain
  MAGIX also takes on all duties regarding the 
  worldwide freedb community

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#12

Post by big_chungus »

mark-r wrote: post #10
ianlevesque wrote: post #2

It seems like this is some archaic service that provides song titles and album artist information for some physical DRM-free uncompressed audio format from years gone.

Yes it is, and it works brilliantly for that use case. I like to rip my own CDs so that I know the source of my music and can control the quality. I use Exact Audio Copy which has an automatic download from freedb.org. I have no idea what I'm going to do once it shuts down.

The DB and server software are available; I use it for the same case and am putting up my own instance. EAC allows adding a custom freedb server, as I recall.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#13

Post by [deleted] »

mark-r wrote: post #10
ianlevesque wrote: post #2

It seems like this is some archaic service that provides song titles and album artist information for some physical DRM-free uncompressed audio format from years gone.

Yes it is, and it works brilliantly for that use case. I like to rip my own CDs so that I know the source of my music and can control the quality. I use Exact Audio Copy which has an automatic download from freedb.org. I have no idea what I'm going to do once it shuts down.

[deleted]

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#14

Post by zozbot234 »

jacquesm wrote: post #4

That's a real pity, but they didn't stand a chance against musicbrainz: https://musicbrainz.org/ I ran a similar service for years (daz.com) and eventually shut it down because musicbrainz was not worth competing with though I think we did a better job of tying the links between the various bands by tracking artists from one act to another, also studio artists which made it quite nice for music discovery.

Does musicbrainz support the 'Disc ID' tags that FreeDB uses?

Also, ISTM that it should be quite feasible for musicbrainz to track artists and "acts", in a pinch by cross-referencing wikidata.org which acts as a sort of shared focus for the whole Linked-Open-Data metaverse.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#15

Post by jacquesm »

hamiltont wrote: post #11

Disclaimer: I know nothing about what led to this situation Found it a bit sad to see this notice followed by a recent news headline saying the project was guaranteed to continue: Continuation of the free database guaranteed With the acquisition of the www.freedb.org domain MAGIX also takes on all duties regarding the worldwide freedb community

That acquisition was the reason why I made a fork of the freedb database, I'm actually pretty happy with how long they held out.

I would encourage everybody to download the software:

http://www.freedb.org/en/download__server_software.4.html

And the db:

http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/

It would be good to have multiple copies floating around.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#16

Post by jacquesm »

zozbot234 wrote: post #14
jacquesm wrote: post #4

That's a real pity, but they didn't stand a chance against musicbrainz: https://musicbrainz.org/ I ran a similar service for years (daz.com) and eventually shut it down because musicbrainz was not worth competing with though I think we did a better job of tying the links between the various bands by tracking artists from one act to another, also studio artists which made it quite nice for music discovery.

Does musicbrainz support the 'Disc ID' tags that FreeDB uses? Also, ISTM that it should be quite feasible for musicbrainz to track artists and "acts", in a pinch by cross-referencing wikidata.org which acts as a sort of shared focus for the whole Linked-Open-Data metaverse.

Disc ID's weren't perfect, you can make a pretty easy mapping between the two if you want. But software still in maintenance really should switch to musicbrainz (and probably should have switched long ago).

For my own system I used a music fingerprint written by Giancarlo Pascutto (I hope I spelled that right, it's ages ago), which used a really nice algorithm that did not see a single collision in a very large number of tracks.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#17

Post by Scoundreller »

jacquesm wrote: post #15
hamiltont wrote: post #11

Disclaimer: I know nothing about what led to this situation Found it a bit sad to see this notice followed by a recent news headline saying the project was guaranteed to continue: Continuation of the free database guaranteed With the acquisition of the www.freedb.org domain MAGIX also takes on all duties regarding the worldwide freedb community

That acquisition was the reason why I made a fork of the freedb database, I'm actually pretty happy with how long they held out. I would encourage everybody to download the software: http://www.freedb.org/en/download__server_software.4.html And the db: http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/ It would be good to have multiple copies floating around.

4gb for the whole database (compressed).

It seems like so little for artists/tracknames of every piece of music ever published (to CD), because it would take 0.1% of my disk space, while knowing it's so much data.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#19

Post by yoavm »

ianlevesque wrote: post #2

It seems like this is some archaic service that provides song titles and album artist information for some physical DRM-free uncompressed audio format from years gone.

I guess "archaic" is how we call actual useful online services these day. Websites and services that just work, without harassing the user, and do what they do well. If this is archaic, gosh, may we have more of these archaic things.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#20

Post by [deleted] »

yoavm wrote: post #19
ianlevesque wrote: post #2

It seems like this is some archaic service that provides song titles and album artist information for some physical DRM-free uncompressed audio format from years gone.

I guess "archaic" is how we call actual useful online services these day. Websites and services that just work, without harassing the user, and do what they do well. If this is archaic, gosh, may we have more of these archaic things.

[deleted]
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