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FreeDB Is Shutting Down

freedb.org

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Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#71

Post by vxNsr »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #39
spondyl wrote: post #31

As a slightly unrelated note, how do these sort of databases actually get bootstrapped? I imagine as you get up and running, you'd end up with industry contacts, access to industry data sources and so on but I'd be interested to know how these sorts of things get started?

Ummm... no industry contacts. It’s just a bunch of people who are anal about music. It has always been like that in the Web 1.0 days: just a bunch of people being anal about something. And it worked beautifully.

Web 1.0: People anal about something and come together to make it better

Web 2.0: People anal about their egos and snipe and attack each other until everyone is the same level of sad and lonely.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#72

Post by toyg »

Lammy wrote: post #29
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.

This seems needlessly hostile for something that affects you so little if you don't have a use for it. I have a huge digital (in the FLAC/MP3 sense) music library ripped almost exclusively from my own physical CD collection, and FreeDB has been an absolutely enormous boon to me over the years. CDs may be "ancient" technology these days, but they sound better than Spotify/YouTube/Apple, have effectively zero* DRM, can…

I think you missed the dry humour in the comment. “Physical DRM-free uncompressed audio” is a barb at the post-CD generation of industry-mandated contraptions, which lowered sound quality and convenience, and the “obsolete” quip is a parody of sneering contemporary tech-types.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#73

Post by Lammy »

toyg wrote: post #72
Lammy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems needlessly hostile for something that affects you so little if you don't have a use for it. I have a huge digital (in the FLAC/MP3 sense) music library ripped almost exclusively from my own physical CD collection, and FreeDB has been an absolutely enormous boon to me over the years. CDs may be "ancient" technology these days, but they sound better than Spotify/YouTube/Apple, have effectively zero* DRM, can…

I think you missed the dry humour in the comment. “Physical DRM-free uncompressed audio” is a barb at the post-CD generation of industry-mandated contraptions, which lowered sound quality and convenience, and the “obsolete” quip is a parody of sneering contemporary tech-types.

Don’t worry, I’m not _that_ sarcasm-blind. Doesn’t change the feeling that it’s overly hostile to say the same dismissive industry contrapoint but hidden behind “haha it’s funny because I’m saying the opposite of what I actually believe”.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#74

Post by Elgolfin »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #34
dehrmann wrote: post #22

Seeing FreeDB reminds me of Audiograbber.

Man, that's a blast from the past. Audiograbber was one of the first pieces of software I ever spent my own money on. I can also remember buying Kali (which let you play IPX LAN games over the TCP/IP internet), ACDSee, and something called I think ZipMagic(?) that made Windows treat zip files as directories. Ah, memories.

Good old times, indeed. The Kali website seems even literally to be stuck in the past (http://kali.net/).

Nostlagia.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#75

Post by ianlevesque »

toyg wrote: post #72
Lammy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems needlessly hostile for something that affects you so little if you don't have a use for it. I have a huge digital (in the FLAC/MP3 sense) music library ripped almost exclusively from my own physical CD collection, and FreeDB has been an absolutely enormous boon to me over the years. CDs may be "ancient" technology these days, but they sound better than Spotify/YouTube/Apple, have effectively zero* DRM, can…

I think you missed the dry humour in the comment. “Physical DRM-free uncompressed audio” is a barb at the post-CD generation of industry-mandated contraptions, which lowered sound quality and convenience, and the “obsolete” quip is a parody of sneering contemporary tech-types.

Yeah HN takes itself way too seriously.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#76

Post by severine »

neves wrote: post #37
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.

Sorry, musicbrainz would be good if there were any good interface to enter data. A good part of my CDs is from independent Brazillian musicians. They have no data in musicbrainz and the interfaces to fill it are a pain in ...

This thread might be of interest: https://community.metabrainz.org/t/can-you-use-picard-to-add...

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#77

Post by The_rationalist »

jwilk wrote: post #69
The_rationalist wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please not have a double standard and flag gamesbrainiac comment too? I'm not strongly against flagging my comment, it's effectively void of substance (zero meaning). But if you flag zero meaning comments, you should even more flag negative meaning comments. By that I mean flagging most of logical fallacies, bullshits, cargo cults, echo chambers, and therefore half of comments on A(G)I topics. By that I mea…

What's A(G)I?

Artificial general intelligence, the graal of computer science.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#78

Post by MrGilbert »

tomc1985 wrote: post #65
scarejunba wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it doesn't take too many more steps to answer your questions from here.

And if they were willing to sell it for a reasonable amount (three-digit sum of money), I might, but most likely they won't. This corporate "has to be profitable" mentality needs to die. It's sad that we are in a place where even simple services require these supposedly ongoing maintenance costs, when they were originally designed as set-it-and-forget-it services

A lot of this stuff is already open - in fact, you are allowed to run your own, local server. After shutdown, I'm pretty sure no one will stop you from hosting a free instance publicly. If in doubt, get written permission from the company, german laws apply.

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

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#79

Post by badatseciruty »

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 software and the database can be downloaded. There's already a few links here to do just that.

I'm sure a few clone sites will pop up and you could always run a local copy yourself.

If Exact Audio Copy doesn't allow you to set the API to connect to, you could always use some proxy software (I use Charles) to forward freedb links to your chosen replacement.

Re: FreeDB Is Shutting Down

#80

Post by [deleted] »

Lammy wrote: post #63
jmillikin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Archaic" because FreeDB has been obsolete for ... 10 years or so? Quite a long time at any rate. MusicBrainz and Discogs are the contemporary equivalents, with MB having (in my opinion) higher quality data, and Discogs having better coverage of obscure Western releases.

MusicBrainz and Discogs are wonderful resources, but I consider them complementary to FreeDB more than equivalent. They are based around the concept of a single canonical "correct" entry for everything, and their tag formatting guidelines are fundamentally at odds with many of my personal tagging preferences. I do love the formatting and structure of MB's Style Guidelines page, but it goes somewhere I dislike from th…

[deleted]
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