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FreeDB Is Shutting Down

freedb.org

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Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#51

Post by jacquesm »

sixtyfourbits wrote: post #46
jacquesm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I made a torrent: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:96208ba12ca7ffdac5b5adccf1a41e484de94f4a&dn=freedb&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.tiny-vps.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.torrentyorg.pl%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2…

Thank you for making this, I will seed the torrent for a couple of weeks or until it looks like nobody is downloading it anymore.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#52

Post by scarejunba »

tomc1985 wrote: post #44

The death of yet another free, bespoke service from the halcyon days of the web. Every time this happens I get more and more angry about the trash-heap-dumpster-fire services from exit-focused "enterpreneurs" that seek to replace them How much could freedb have been costing MAGIX? Could they not have handed it off to someone else?

Why not offer to buy it?

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#53

Post by jacquesm »

Scoundreller wrote: post #18

Ohhhh, back in the late 90s, I saw my friend hand-tagging his ripped CDs. He seemed annoyed when I showed him how CDDB/FreeDB worked.

I digitized a good chunk of the Dutch broadcast archive using a custom built cluster of PCs and a tower of CD readers. We must have processed many thousands of CDs and entered all the meta data and submitted it to CDDB before the Gracenote acquisition. It was pretty interesting to see a whole delivery van full of CD arrive and to see them go away again a week or two later + a crate of harddrives.

The second version of the cluster looked like this:

https://www.clustercompute.com/

The first (of which I have no pictures) was just 10 whitebox PCs.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#54

Post by jacquesm »

scarejunba wrote: post #52
tomc1985 wrote: post #44

The death of yet another free, bespoke service from the halcyon days of the web. Every time this happens I get more and more angry about the trash-heap-dumpster-fire services from exit-focused "enterpreneurs" that seek to replace them How much could freedb have been costing MAGIX? Could they not have handed it off to someone else?

Why not offer to buy it?

Because you'll never make it back. It will just be a money pit. You still need to keep it secure, host it, maintain it. And free users are much worse than paid users in terms of how entitled they feel so you can be prepared for a never ending stream of crap from people telling you how you should run it but who wouldn't pay $0.05 if the life of the site depended on it.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#55

Post by Causality1 »

tomc1985 wrote: post #44

The death of yet another free, bespoke service from the halcyon days of the web. Every time this happens I get more and more angry about the trash-heap-dumpster-fire services from exit-focused "enterpreneurs" that seek to replace them How much could freedb have been costing MAGIX? Could they not have handed it off to someone else?

I'm sure the front page will shortly feature a story on someone's new "CD-ripping as a service" startup.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#56

Post by tomc1985 »

scarejunba wrote: post #52
tomc1985 wrote: post #44

The death of yet another free, bespoke service from the halcyon days of the web. Every time this happens I get more and more angry about the trash-heap-dumpster-fire services from exit-focused "enterpreneurs" that seek to replace them How much could freedb have been costing MAGIX? Could they not have handed it off to someone else?

Why not offer to buy it?

Because I'm not just made of money

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#57

Post by Lammy »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
Lammy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, but it feels so strange to me to see FreeDB framed as being "in competition" with anything. It was designed to do exactly one thing: continue a community-focused and technically-compatible version of CDDB after that project pulled a bait-and-switch in the late '90s by taking the data that was generously- and freely-submitted by users and then spinning themselves into the for-profit Gracenote LLC: https://e…

It's the correct link but it never did any of that beyond some trials, the free mp3 download was a promo given to us for free by bands that wanted to be highlit, I think we did three of those or so before canning it, it just didn't feel right, but some people really liked it, and it might have been a way to generate some revenue without bugging the users. Daz was essentially a wiki which allowed people to link artist…

> But music on the web is very hard to make work as a long term thing, the bills have to be paid and even if the content is user generated you still need to supervise it and ensure that people don't pull tricks to vandalize it or destroy it.

Absolutely, and it's thankless work too, like how the #1 user-agent string on FreeDB's statistics page is "FreedbDemo" straight from their example code project. Moderation is more necessary now, though, with the Musicbrainz/Discogs paradigm where there's one canonical "correct" listing for every artist/album/whatever. One of my favorite parts of FreeDB/CDDB (and one of the reasons I use it to this day) is how many albums have multiple user-submitted entries that fit different tagging styles. I totally get how some people would consider that a downside, and it still doesn't preclude vandals crapflooding you with bogus garbage entries, but I don't consider a lot of the MB/Discogs tagging guidelines to be especially good. Any tag source I use—including the paid GD3—is guaranteed to need at least a little editing, and I find that FreeDB gets me closer to my ideal tagging format more often than any of the others.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#58

Post by iruoy »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #6

How is MusicBrainz doing? The blog has recent updates, that's a good sign. https://musicbrainz.org/

Pretty good I might say looking at all the comments here. The rare album I download is rarely on Musicbrainz though, while Discogs[0] always had it.

I'm sure it has something to do with the music genre these albums fall in (hardstyle), but as I said Discogs did have them all and I've heard the same from people with different tastes in music.

So I like to use TagScanner[1] to tag my albums. It searches both MusicBrainz and Discogs and apparently others as well.

P.S. I checked a single artist to see if Musicbrainz has caught up with Discogs yet a few months ago and the only things listed were a 5 year old album and some singles I believe. I just checked again and in the last 3 months some users added everything else.[2]

[0]: https://discogs.com [1]: https://xdlab.ru/en [2]: https://musicbrainz.org/artist/5347c7dc-a8bd-4a05-8ae1-a17fb...

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#59

Post by jacquesm »

Lammy wrote: post #57
jacquesm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the correct link but it never did any of that beyond some trials, the free mp3 download was a promo given to us for free by bands that wanted to be highlit, I think we did three of those or so before canning it, it just didn't feel right, but some people really liked it, and it might have been a way to generate some revenue without bugging the users. Daz was essentially a wiki which allowed people to link artist…

> But music on the web is very hard to make work as a long term thing, the bills have to be paid and even if the content is user generated you still need to supervise it and ensure that people don't pull tricks to vandalize it or destroy it. Absolutely, and it's thankless work too, like how the #1 user-agent string on FreeDB's statistics page is "FreedbDemo" straight from their example code project. Moderation is mor…

That makes good sense. Tagging consistency was a nightmare to get right and even though we did an ok job at it I was never 100% satisfied. If you want I can probably still dig up our database somewhere as a mysql dump and get it over to you. There might be something useful in there.
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