7 ms·

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 year

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.

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.