11 ms·

FreeDB Is Shutting Down

214 points by big_chungus 7y ago

ianlevesque 7y ago
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.
- mark-r 7y ago
  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.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    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.
    - stordoff 7y ago
      I'm tempted to do the same, but as someone who is buying _new_ music on CD this doesn't particularly help. It seems CTDB provides access to MusicBrainz, so that might be my alternative. http://cue.tools/wiki/CTDB_EAC_Plugin http://cue.tools/wiki/CTDB_EAC_Plugin
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    EAC is still around? Is it still being updated?
    - Lammy 7y ago
      Yep! It's been "stable" (>= 1.0) since 2015, has seen a handful of releases since, and will surely see more when the time comes: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=EAC_release_history http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=EAC_release_histo...
  - anonymoushn 7y ago
    I typically buy music that isn't in any DB anyway, so I enter it on vgmdb then use vgmdb's cddb endpoint. Maybe one of the competing services will work for you for commercial music?
  - badatseciruty 7y ago
    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.
- yoavm 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmillikin 7y ago
    "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.
    - duelingjello 7y ago
      Data is never obsolete when it comes to archival, unless you’re a consumer who doesn’t read books or care about the past.
    - Lammy 7y ago
      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 the very first Principles page: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction_and_artist_intent https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction... "Artists sometimes choose to present names and titles in ways that deliberately contradict the rules of the language they're in (e.g. unorthodox spellings) and/or the MusicBrainz Style Guidelines. To describe the way we handle such choices, we use the term 'artist intent.' The general idea is that if an artist intended something to be written in a special way, then MusicBrainz should follow that intent. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find out what an artist intended. If you want to claim that some deviation from the Style Guidelines should be considered artist intent, the burden of proof lies on you. A seeming error may be considered evidence of artist intent if it is consistently found on all of an artist's official releases. The best evidence would be a statement of intent by the artist (e.g. edit 6892422: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/6892422 https://musicbrainz.org/edit/6892422)." Arguing with other music nerds on the Internet about which one of us has the Factually Correct Tags is not my idea of fun, and FreeDB avoids this problem by supporting multiple entries for any given disc. I totally understand how some people would consider that a burden, but I smile any time I get to choose from a few entries on FreeDB because one of them will always be substantially closer to my ideal. For me this usually manifests in ways such as (but not limited to): - Genre tags. According to Discogs half my CDs belong in a single bucked labeled "Folk, World, & Country" https://www.discogs.com/genre/folk%2C+world%2C+%26+country https://www.discogs.com/genre/folk%2C+world%2C+%26+country - Use of Artist vs AlbumArtist - "Featured artists" in the title tag vs in the Artist tag (vs not listed at all?) - "Year" tags when an album's slightly-staggered multi-region release overlaps a year boundary, or when a different label has re-released a bit-identical disc with packaging labeled a different year. I have that problem with a lot of my CDs from Sire or Tommy Boy Records where the post-1985 pressings are distributed under Reprise with a new date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_Records#Revival_and_Reprise_today_(1985-present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_Records#Revival_and_Re... - Title capitalization, my most frequent hassle. I have many CDs with track or artist names in ALL CAPS ENGLISH SHOUTING style. Super super common on Japanese releases, and both MB and Discogs used to have rules specifically banning anything except Camel Cased English Literary Title style. I say "used to" because they have both gotten better on that issue, but a good percentage of the older data was entered under the old Title Case Only guidelines and remains that way. For an example, compare the same album described on Musicbrainz https://musicbrainz.org/release/041f87d6-6583-42cd-8cf3-5f4a87b73fd0 https://musicbrainz.org/release/041f87d6-6583-42cd-8cf3-5f4a... versus on a fandom wiki https://remywiki.com/Beatmania_HIROSHI_WATANABE_beat_indication https://remywiki.com/Beatmania_HIROSHI_WATANABE_beat_indicat... This is the relevant Musicbrainz guideline that didn't used to exist: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Language/Japanese https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Language/Japanese "Although the Japanese script has no capitalization, it is very common for Japanese titles to contain words in other scripts. Japanese artists have a tendency to choose capitalization and punctuation for aesthetic reasons; and to be very consistent regarding case over all releases. For this reason, words in the Latin script on a Japanese release should be in the same case as on the album art if other available sources, such as official discography or record label pages, are consistent; not normalized according to English or other capitalization standards." But then _that_ guideline rubs me the wrong way, implying "capitalization and punctuation for aesthetic reasons" is exclusive to one culture, and letting record labels and marketing materials override the artistic work itself. Here's an example from Scotland: bis' 2007 CD+DVD greatest hits release. - Title Cased on Musicbrainz: https://musicbrainz.org/release/45a14f8d-687d-4309-aa83-10044057bef1 https://musicbrainz.org/release/45a14f8d-687d-4309-aa83-1004... - Title Cased on Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/Bis-We-Are-Bis-From-Glasgow-Scotland-Greatest-Hits/release/2691368 https://www.discogs.com/Bis-We-Are-Bis-From-Glasgow-Scotland... - obviously aesthetically lower-cased on the actual album I'm holding in real life: https://i.imgur.com/hlaIRHj.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hlaIRHj.jpg The FreeDB system we're losing allows me to share my tags alongside the Title Cased version, so everyone can be happy: https://i.imgur.com/xrFj66A.png https://i.imgur.com/xrFj66A.png Obviously any metadata service at all is perfectly fine for the 99% of people who just want some idea of what song they're listening to, and I realize I'm making my life way more difficult than it needs to be by caring about this to the extent I do, but music is too important and personal of a thing for me to settle for 99%. In a world of otherwise constant chaos my music library is my one zen garden. The single thing I curate to something asymptotically approaching my concept of perfection. A more accurate log of my own feelings and experiences than any words. Replicating the FreeDB data on my local network wont be hard, and that database will undoubtedly serve me well for years as I discover different things new to me despite their chronological age, but we're losing something way more special here than just the data and a crusty old Perl CGI script.
- Lammy 7y ago
  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 be resold, and I will continue buying them as long as I'm able. This is a sad day :( [*] Assuming they care about putting the "CDDA" logo on their product, but luckily those non-standard outliers—Sony rootkit included—mostly came and went with the the 2000s.
  - toyg 7y ago
    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.
    - Lammy 7y ago
      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”.
    - ianlevesque 7y ago
      Yeah HN takes itself way too seriously.
alrs 7y ago
Should anyone want to parse the dataset as it is today and do something with it, I recently wrote some Go to that end: https://github.com/alrs/freedb https://github.com/alrs/freedb
jacquesm 7y ago
That's a real pity, but they didn't stand a chance against musicbrainz: https://musicbrainz.org/ 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.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Just wanted to say the same. This is the last time to update all the clients relying on FreeDB to use MusicBrainz, it's about time.
  - Lammy 7y ago
    Updating FreeDB clients to use Musixbrainz used to be as easy as changing the API URL, but unfortunately Musicbrainz deprecated their side of that interface a year or so ago: https://blog.metabrainz.org/2018/09/18/freedb-gateway-end-of-life-notice-march-18-2019/ https://blog.metabrainz.org/2018/09/18/freedb-gateway-end-of...
  - dangravell 7y ago
    We run our own FreeDB server at OneMusicAPI which we use to combine with other data. If anyone is inconvenienced by the FreeDB shutdown and needs some short term service to get them by, while they work out what else to do, send us an email and we can see if we can open our FreeDB server. http://www.onemusicapi.com/blog/2014/12/03/retrieving-freedb-album-covers/ http://www.onemusicapi.com/blog/2014/12/03/retrieving-freedb... (this talks about using our API, but we could open our FreeDB access point too).
- zozbot234 7y ago
  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.
The_rationalist 7y ago
I first read it as freeBSD!!
- dang 7y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it quite a bit and we're trying for more substance here.
  - The_rationalist 7y ago
    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 mean flagging most of logical fallacies I'm currently working on a tool to automate this.
    - jwilk 7y ago
      What's A(G)I?
      - The_rationalist 7y ago
        Artificial general intelligence, the graal of computer science.
    - dang 7y ago
      I understand the desire for consistency, but moderation can't be consistent because we don't see everything that gets posted here. It's particularly difficult for moderation to see into the future—the comment you mention didn't exist when I replied to you.
      - The_rationalist 7y ago
NelsonMinar 7y ago
How is MusicBrainz doing? The blog has recent updates, that's a good sign. https://musicbrainz.org/ https://musicbrainz.org/
- Avamander 7y ago
  They're doing great. Quite a lot of edits flowing in, dataset growing and being fixed. It's a great volunteer effort. Could always use more developers and editors though.
- iruoy 7y ago
  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 https://discogs.com [1]: https://xdlab.ru/en https://xdlab.ru/en [2]: https://musicbrainz.org/artist/5347c7dc-a8bd-4a05-8ae1-a17fb1e6a388/edits https://musicbrainz.org/artist/5347c7dc-a8bd-4a05-8ae1-a17fb...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hamiltont 7y ago
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
- jacquesm 7y ago
  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 http://www.freedb.org/en/download__server_software.4.html And the db: http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/ http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/ It would be good to have multiple copies floating around.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    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.
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      It's less than 1GB; the four large archives you see that are each nine-hundred-and-change megs are dated snapshots. Just pull the latest from here (current as of 12/03/2019): http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/freedb-complete-20191203.tar.bz2 http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/freedb-complete-20191203.ta...
      - emmelaich 7y ago
        Thanks! It's 948Mb.
        codetrotter 7y ago
Scoundreller 7y ago
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.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  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/ https://www.clustercompute.com/ The first (of which I have no pictures) was just 10 whitebox PCs.
dehrmann 7y ago
Seeing FreeDB reminds me of Audiograbber.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  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.
  - Elgolfin 7y ago
    Good old times, indeed. The Kali website seems even literally to be stuck in the past (http://kali.net/ http://kali.net/). Nostlagia.
spondyl 7y ago
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?
- layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
  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.
  - vxNsr 7y ago
    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.
- warp 7y ago
  When I was a developer on MusicBrainz (2010-2013) we didn't have access to any industry data sources. Some of our customers did though, and wanted to feed that back into the MusicBrainz database. When we took a look at that data, it turned out that it was pretty messy, and couldn't be used directly. We discussed storing that data separately, and building a tool so users could easily import from it -- so it could be verified and cleaned up by a human before becoming part of the database. I don't remember if that ever got built.
tomc1985 7y ago
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?
- Lammy 7y ago
  > How much could freedb have been costing MAGIX? More than zero. MAGIX acquired freedb in 2006, so I assume this decision was an easy one for some middle manager who has been there for a couple years and has no love for some crusty Old Internet service that's beyond obsolete (aka can't figure out how to put ads on it).
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Why not offer to buy it?
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    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.
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      I certainly believe this but thread OP does not.
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    Because I'm not just made of money
    - scarejunba 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gamesbrainiac 7y ago
For a second there I thought it was FreeBSD.
creeble 7y ago
Ug, I'm late to this discussion, but I can't find anything in the Musicbrainz.org documentation that provides the same access / results as FreeDB. In other words, from a "discid" (in Musicbrainz format or FreeDB format or otherwise), I want artist, album, and track titles, and optimally cover artwork. Does anyone know how to get that, in JSON or XML format, from Musicbrainz?
- creeble 7y ago
  Okay, to answer my own question: https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/discid/I5l9cCSFccLKFEKS.7wqSZAorPU-?fmt=json https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/discid/I5l9cCSFccLKFEKS.7wqSZAo... will give you a list of "releases" for that discid. Use the release ID in this endpoint, with the included parameters: https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/8e061dc4-790e-4587-ba53-011e7852f88d?inc=recordings&fmt=json https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/8e061dc4-790e-4587-ba53... and you'll get the track data. Not quite sure how to get the album art yet, but should follow.
  - Freso 7y ago
    Cover art, when available, is via the Cover Art Archive API: https://coverartarchive.org/api https://coverartarchive.org/api (The Release lookup has a `cover-art-archive` JSON object which contains information about what can be fetched from CAA.)

214 points by big_chungus 7y ago

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.

mark-r 7y ago
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.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  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.
  - stordoff 7y ago
    I'm tempted to do the same, but as someone who is buying _new_ music on CD this doesn't particularly help. It seems CTDB provides access to MusicBrainz, so that might be my alternative. http://cue.tools/wiki/CTDB_EAC_Plugin http://cue.tools/wiki/CTDB_EAC_Plugin
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- StavrosK 7y ago
  EAC is still around? Is it still being updated?
  - Lammy 7y ago
    Yep! It's been "stable" (>= 1.0) since 2015, has seen a handful of releases since, and will surely see more when the time comes: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=EAC_release_history http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=EAC_release_histo...
- anonymoushn 7y ago
  I typically buy music that isn't in any DB anyway, so I enter it on vgmdb then use vgmdb's cddb endpoint. Maybe one of the competing services will work for you for commercial music?
- badatseciruty 7y ago
  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.
yoavm 7y ago
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 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jmillikin 7y ago
  "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.
  - duelingjello 7y ago
    Data is never obsolete when it comes to archival, unless you’re a consumer who doesn’t read books or care about the past.
  - Lammy 7y ago
    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 the very first Principles page: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction_and_artist_intent https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction... "Artists sometimes choose to present names and titles in ways that deliberately contradict the rules of the language they're in (e.g. unorthodox spellings) and/or the MusicBrainz Style Guidelines. To describe the way we handle such choices, we use the term 'artist intent.' The general idea is that if an artist intended something to be written in a special way, then MusicBrainz should follow that intent. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find out what an artist intended. If you want to claim that some deviation from the Style Guidelines should be considered artist intent, the burden of proof lies on you. A seeming error may be considered evidence of artist intent if it is consistently found on all of an artist's official releases. The best evidence would be a statement of intent by the artist (e.g. edit 6892422: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/6892422 https://musicbrainz.org/edit/6892422)." Arguing with other music nerds on the Internet about which one of us has the Factually Correct Tags is not my idea of fun, and FreeDB avoids this problem by supporting multiple entries for any given disc. I totally understand how some people would consider that a burden, but I smile any time I get to choose from a few entries on FreeDB because one of them will always be substantially closer to my ideal. For me this usually manifests in ways such as (but not limited to): - Genre tags. According to Discogs half my CDs belong in a single bucked labeled "Folk, World, & Country" https://www.discogs.com/genre/folk%2C+world%2C+%26+country https://www.discogs.com/genre/folk%2C+world%2C+%26+country - Use of Artist vs AlbumArtist - "Featured artists" in the title tag vs in the Artist tag (vs not listed at all?) - "Year" tags when an album's slightly-staggered multi-region release overlaps a year boundary, or when a different label has re-released a bit-identical disc with packaging labeled a different year. I have that problem with a lot of my CDs from Sire or Tommy Boy Records where the post-1985 pressings are distributed under Reprise with a new date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_Records#Revival_and_Reprise_today_(1985-present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprise_Records#Revival_and_Re... - Title capitalization, my most frequent hassle. I have many CDs with track or artist names in ALL CAPS ENGLISH SHOUTING style. Super super common on Japanese releases, and both MB and Discogs used to have rules specifically banning anything except Camel Cased English Literary Title style. I say "used to" because they have both gotten better on that issue, but a good percentage of the older data was entered under the old Title Case Only guidelines and remains that way. For an example, compare the same album described on Musicbrainz https://musicbrainz.org/release/041f87d6-6583-42cd-8cf3-5f4a87b73fd0 https://musicbrainz.org/release/041f87d6-6583-42cd-8cf3-5f4a... versus on a fandom wiki https://remywiki.com/Beatmania_HIROSHI_WATANABE_beat_indication https://remywiki.com/Beatmania_HIROSHI_WATANABE_beat_indicat... This is the relevant Musicbrainz guideline that didn't used to exist: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Language/Japanese https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Language/Japanese "Although the Japanese script has no capitalization, it is very common for Japanese titles to contain words in other scripts. Japanese artists have a tendency to choose capitalization and punctuation for aesthetic reasons; and to be very consistent regarding case over all releases. For this reason, words in the Latin script on a Japanese release should be in the same case as on the album art if other available sources, such as official discography or record label pages, are consistent; not normalized according to English or other capitalization standards." But then _that_ guideline rubs me the wrong way, implying "capitalization and punctuation for aesthetic reasons" is exclusive to one culture, and letting record labels and marketing materials override the artistic work itself. Here's an example from Scotland: bis' 2007 CD+DVD greatest hits release. - Title Cased on Musicbrainz: https://musicbrainz.org/release/45a14f8d-687d-4309-aa83-10044057bef1 https://musicbrainz.org/release/45a14f8d-687d-4309-aa83-1004... - Title Cased on Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/Bis-We-Are-Bis-From-Glasgow-Scotland-Greatest-Hits/release/2691368 https://www.discogs.com/Bis-We-Are-Bis-From-Glasgow-Scotland... - obviously aesthetically lower-cased on the actual album I'm holding in real life: https://i.imgur.com/hlaIRHj.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hlaIRHj.jpg The FreeDB system we're losing allows me to share my tags alongside the Title Cased version, so everyone can be happy: https://i.imgur.com/xrFj66A.png https://i.imgur.com/xrFj66A.png Obviously any metadata service at all is perfectly fine for the 99% of people who just want some idea of what song they're listening to, and I realize I'm making my life way more difficult than it needs to be by caring about this to the extent I do, but music is too important and personal of a thing for me to settle for 99%. In a world of otherwise constant chaos my music library is my one zen garden. The single thing I curate to something asymptotically approaching my concept of perfection. A more accurate log of my own feelings and experiences than any words. Replicating the FreeDB data on my local network wont be hard, and that database will undoubtedly serve me well for years as I discover different things new to me despite their chronological age, but we're losing something way more special here than just the data and a crusty old Perl CGI script.
Lammy 7y ago
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 be resold, and I will continue buying them as long as I'm able. This is a sad day :( [*] Assuming they care about putting the "CDDA" logo on their product, but luckily those non-standard outliers—Sony rootkit included—mostly came and went with the the 2000s.
- toyg 7y ago
  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.
  - Lammy 7y ago
    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”.
  - ianlevesque 7y ago
    Yeah HN takes itself way too seriously.

alrs 7y ago

Should anyone want to parse the dataset as it is today and do something with it, I recently wrote some Go to that end: https://github.com/alrs/freedb https://github.com/alrs/freedb

jacquesm 7y ago

That's a real pity, but they didn't stand a chance against musicbrainz: https://musicbrainz.org/ 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.

Avamander 7y ago
Just wanted to say the same. This is the last time to update all the clients relying on FreeDB to use MusicBrainz, it's about time.
- Lammy 7y ago
  Updating FreeDB clients to use Musixbrainz used to be as easy as changing the API URL, but unfortunately Musicbrainz deprecated their side of that interface a year or so ago: https://blog.metabrainz.org/2018/09/18/freedb-gateway-end-of-life-notice-march-18-2019/ https://blog.metabrainz.org/2018/09/18/freedb-gateway-end-of...
- dangravell 7y ago
  We run our own FreeDB server at OneMusicAPI which we use to combine with other data. If anyone is inconvenienced by the FreeDB shutdown and needs some short term service to get them by, while they work out what else to do, send us an email and we can see if we can open our FreeDB server. http://www.onemusicapi.com/blog/2014/12/03/retrieving-freedb-album-covers/ http://www.onemusicapi.com/blog/2014/12/03/retrieving-freedb... (this talks about using our API, but we could open our FreeDB access point too).
zozbot234 7y ago
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.

The_rationalist 7y ago

I first read it as freeBSD!!

dang 7y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it quite a bit and we're trying for more substance here.
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  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 mean flagging most of logical fallacies I'm currently working on a tool to automate this.
  - jwilk 7y ago
    What's A(G)I?
    - The_rationalist 7y ago
      Artificial general intelligence, the graal of computer science.
  - dang 7y ago
    I understand the desire for consistency, but moderation can't be consistent because we don't see everything that gets posted here. It's particularly difficult for moderation to see into the future—the comment you mention didn't exist when I replied to you.
    - The_rationalist 7y ago

NelsonMinar 7y ago

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

Avamander 7y ago
They're doing great. Quite a lot of edits flowing in, dataset growing and being fixed. It's a great volunteer effort. Could always use more developers and editors though.
iruoy 7y ago
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 https://discogs.com [1]: https://xdlab.ru/en https://xdlab.ru/en [2]: https://musicbrainz.org/artist/5347c7dc-a8bd-4a05-8ae1-a17fb1e6a388/edits https://musicbrainz.org/artist/5347c7dc-a8bd-4a05-8ae1-a17fb...

deleted 7y ago

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hamiltont 7y ago

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

jacquesm 7y ago
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 http://www.freedb.org/en/download__server_software.4.html And the db: http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/ http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/ It would be good to have multiple copies floating around.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  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.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    It's less than 1GB; the four large archives you see that are each nine-hundred-and-change megs are dated snapshots. Just pull the latest from here (current as of 12/03/2019): http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/freedb-complete-20191203.tar.bz2 http://ftp.freedb.org/pub/freedb/freedb-complete-20191203.ta...
    - emmelaich 7y ago
      Thanks! It's 948Mb.
      - codetrotter 7y ago

Scoundreller 7y ago

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.

jacquesm 7y ago
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/ https://www.clustercompute.com/ The first (of which I have no pictures) was just 10 whitebox PCs.

dehrmann 7y ago

Seeing FreeDB reminds me of Audiograbber.

LeoPanthera 7y ago
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.
- Elgolfin 7y ago
  Good old times, indeed. The Kali website seems even literally to be stuck in the past (http://kali.net/ http://kali.net/). Nostlagia.

spondyl 7y ago

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?

layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
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.
- vxNsr 7y ago
  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.
warp 7y ago
When I was a developer on MusicBrainz (2010-2013) we didn't have access to any industry data sources. Some of our customers did though, and wanted to feed that back into the MusicBrainz database. When we took a look at that data, it turned out that it was pretty messy, and couldn't be used directly. We discussed storing that data separately, and building a tool so users could easily import from it -- so it could be verified and cleaned up by a human before becoming part of the database. I don't remember if that ever got built.

tomc1985 7y ago

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?

Lammy 7y ago
> How much could freedb have been costing MAGIX? More than zero. MAGIX acquired freedb in 2006, so I assume this decision was an easy one for some middle manager who has been there for a couple years and has no love for some crusty Old Internet service that's beyond obsolete (aka can't figure out how to put ads on it).
scarejunba 7y ago
Why not offer to buy it?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  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.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    I certainly believe this but thread OP does not.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Because I'm not just made of money
  - scarejunba 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

gamesbrainiac 7y ago

For a second there I thought it was FreeBSD.

creeble 7y ago

Ug, I'm late to this discussion, but I can't find anything in the Musicbrainz.org documentation that provides the same access / results as FreeDB. In other words, from a "discid" (in Musicbrainz format or FreeDB format or otherwise), I want artist, album, and track titles, and optimally cover artwork. Does anyone know how to get that, in JSON or XML format, from Musicbrainz?

creeble 7y ago
Okay, to answer my own question: https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/discid/I5l9cCSFccLKFEKS.7wqSZAorPU-?fmt=json https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/discid/I5l9cCSFccLKFEKS.7wqSZAo... will give you a list of "releases" for that discid. Use the release ID in this endpoint, with the included parameters: https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/8e061dc4-790e-4587-ba53-011e7852f88d?inc=recordings&fmt=json https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/8e061dc4-790e-4587-ba53... and you'll get the track data. Not quite sure how to get the album art yet, but should follow.
- Freso 7y ago
  Cover art, when available, is via the Cover Art Archive API: https://coverartarchive.org/api https://coverartarchive.org/api (The Release lookup has a `cover-art-archive` JSON object which contains information about what can be fetched from CAA.)