http://www.freedb.org/

The future of freedb


Posted by kaiser on Saturday, July 01 @ 20:18:47 UTC (253 reads)


About freedb.org freedb is not able to operate without Joerg and Ari. There are other - hopefully free - projects that will take over freedbs heritage in a better way and stay free. freedbs future did not seem to be kept free regarding the lastest developments, so I tried to steer against this as I felt it more important to stay free instead of getting fancy web 2.0 features. But unfortunately Joerg and Ari (the main doers behind freedb) disagreed with me and decided that they want to go another direction. I will refuse to comment their postings in plublic and I will thank both Ari anf Jörg for their work and their support.

Now being sick of how things turned out lately and I am not being able to run the project with the people in freedb left, I will stop this project in the forseeable future.

If somebody is interested in a pretty well-known domain, send an offer to: lurchentsafter at gmail.com

Sorry for this.


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I quit


Posted by megari on Saturday, July 01 @ 19:06:55 UTC (106 reads)


About freedb.org After several years of successful work I am leaving freedb along with Jörg due to the current situation being unbearable. Without Jörg most of the fun of being part of freedb is gone and I do not believe I could work successfully with Mr. Kaiser whose definition of teamwork seems to vary from day to day and whom I have lost trust in.

I thank all the users, mirror server administrators, contributors, users and lurkers who have with their interest and support made this work worth it. Because of you I leave with a heavy heart and great sorrow and anxiety over the future of freedb.

Ari Sundholm

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Goodbye to freedb after 6 successful years


Posted by joerg on Saturday, July 01 @ 19:04:52 UTC (107 reads)


About freedb.org Today, after six long years, it is time for me to say goodbye to freedb. I started off creating database archives for download and finding ftp mirrors to host it in 2000 and ended up being responsible for basically every aspect of freedb. I feel like freedb is a part of my identity and it is ripping me apart, having to leave it now.

For almost two years now Ari and I have supported a developer from Australia, who was working on the next generation of the freedb server, which would have overcome most of our current technological problems and offered text searching. This was the biggest chance for freedb in years. Unfortunately there have been rising tensions in our team about the question, how long we should support a development project, which has not yet been made open source by the developer and which is not yet running on freedb servers. Last weekend the line was crossed by the founder of freedb, who owns the domain, when he took action against that developer without talking to the rest of the team first, while we were still trying to find a solution in everyone's interest.

With every chance gone for the developed software to become part of freedb and with the necessary basic level of trust between the owner of the domain freedb.org and me being destroyed, I see no more point in investing my spare time in this. I am not sure what me leaving will really mean for freedb, but considering my experiences from the past six years, I expect the future is not looking too bright. It is devastating for me to see that this issue could accomplish in a matter of weeks what Gracenote couldn't do for 7 long years since freedb was started.

I would like to thank the freedb community who made this service what it is today by helping out in various ways and submitting lots and lots of new database entries to us. We started with less than 200.000 database entries - today we have more than 2.000.000. YOU are the ones who made this worth doing and who make it so hard for me to leave.
I would also like to especially thank the mirror administrators for contributing their time, bandwidth and servers. Without them, freedb would not have been able to cope with the load that came with it's success. Special thanks go to Drew Streib, who has provided our master server for free for all this time, and Ari Sundholm, who has run freedb together with me for the past few years and tried to work on a solution with me till the last minute.

If you really need to contact me for some reason, use my personal e-mail address j.hevers at web.de.

What now?

Seems like alot of really good projects are being "pronounced dead".
Man whats next.

Incidentally, I had just given Peter a new version of my freedb component that allows retrieving tags directly from the CD ripping dialog in foobar2000 0.9.3 when someone posted news of this in the foobar2000 IRC channel. Talk about irony. I guess this will speed up the development of a foosic based tagging component for foobar2000. (Yes, that is a prediction about my own plans.)

Well, crap.

So what's going to happen now? EAC has integration with freedb, what's going to happen to that?

It is sad really when a project that has lasted so long dies like this especially when they offered such a good service for free. I just hope that another free alternative rises to that EAC and foobar2000 users can continue to get CD information online.

2 tears in a bucket...

Maybe the big chance for MusicBrainz?

Has anyone got some information about http://freedb2.org/ ??

just found an article where it said that its an improved version of freedb or so.
working with your freedbtagger, foosion (thx btw, nice plugin)

Sounds cool. Do you have experiences with MusicBrainz. Can you give me a short overview, how it works, how it can be used?
I have all my music as WAW with CUEs. Does MusicBrainz help me with these kind of files?

I think freedb2.org is the improved server that all the fuss is about. By the way, it didn't work with my component until recently because of a violation of the database entry specifiction (the signature line was wrong). I contacted the author through the - now unavailable - freedb forum on Friday, and he promptly fixed that.

Could be, I was waiting for a good reason to try MusicBrainz.

Tragically, this might be it.

I just don't get it how can a so widespread system be totally dependent on two people. freedb.org seems to be already down, but servers could work with the mainterance of others, couldn't ? Would it have legal issues to upload the whole database (hope the torrents are still alive) somewhere and continue with the project, perhaps under a different name?
Is the protocol on the server side available freely to the public ?

But perhaps this is not as bad as one might thing. The closedown of freedb could and hopefully will accelerate the evolution in this area and a new system built from scratch, or developed from the existing ones will be most probably superior to freedb.

And it would be good to avoid the situation, where different standards would fight for dominance
But if freedb2 (whatever it is) works with the current clients, i see no real problem

This is really upsetting. This is gonna have a huge impact on a lot of free software. I hope the mirror's stay up until an alternative appear.

I am also surprised the the entire freedb project is dependant on two people alone to exist. Why can't the project be passed along to other team members or people who are willing to maintain it? Freedb is such an excellent resource to have, especially for a majority of audio rippers, taggers, and other programs that use the database. This is gonna cause a lot of issues for a lot of apps out there.

Very sad news...

It got dugg

http://www.duggmirror.com/linux_unix/freedb_is_closing_down/

one problem is that freedb2 seems to be "closed source"...

Couldn't somebody just get the latest freedb database and then implement that into a new project?

Link: http://musicbrainz.org/

I just checked, the data files are licensed under the GPL so yes, one could do that. You have to make the modified data files available for download, though, so you should bring some bandwidth or hope most people will use the torrents.

MedO

PS: IANAL, and all legal opinion I give may be completely wrong.

Well, at least I have the DB on my HDD, so even if the server should go down, the DB is here.

Oh, i really hope that MB will become the new reference free-cd-db, due to its open license.



Here's an interesting link: CDex with Musicbrainz support

Well, if foosion's "prediction" on his own plans (lol) is to come true, we'll actually have another option
Ofcourse for that to happen, foosic will need more universal software-support.

Since it is likely that the developers of software tools that are interfacing with FreeDB will now be looking for a new service, this moment is just right to make them aware of our system of choice...

After playing around with Musicbrainz...I think its a very good alternative to freedb.

Wow.

foosic has currently 97.000 albums in the database, musicbrainz something over 400.000, both way below freedb's size.
I think the the freedb successor will need to import freedb's database into it's own db

Actually, musicbrainz has an interface to freedb, but you can only use it to manually import albums. It's a funny solution; they want to ensure that imported entries are checked to adhere to their extensive guidelines - or at least that's what I think is the rationale behind it. I imported two or three albums that way, and even though it was a smooth experience, it's probably too much effort to make it effective.

The alternative is indeed to just import all content that is in freedb. It means you're bringing in a lot of rubbish, too. I guess the musicbrainz people have though about that, and probably they had good reasons not to go that way. Once you have a lot of double entries in your db, it's harder to get them out than not allowing that in the first place, for example.

The strict tagging and naming guidelines that musicbrainz imposes are a natural reaction to the mess that freedb is (or was?), but it's not an ideal solution. I don't like to have to tag my albums according to their guidelines if I want to be allowed to add new data. It's all too rigid. And then consider that my music is mostly easy to tag... try tagging some classical music

OK, that was sort of a braindump, probably you're thinking: "how is this a reaction to my post?"
I think in the end, I agree with your idea that a successor will have to build upon freedb's content. But it will take a really smart database engineer to make it an improvement over freedb...

Maybe this could work for foosic, if they specify that every implementation that uses their db also does the fingerprinting stuff. Then they could just import all the freedb stuff, and some of it will just never get linked to real songs, and can eventually be washed out of the db... Probably this is oversimplified and naive thinking.

I've been playing around with the MusicBrainz Picard tagger. While I admire the consistency and organization of their DB, the tagging program itself is rather clunky and not very intuitive. The MusicBrainz DB is quite complete, there's some stuff I couldn't find, but everything else I searched for was spot on. And remember that freedb has a lot of info because theres a lot of repeated entries per album, this is something MB are avoiding with their own DB I think.

I think if more people use the foosic component knowing that the freedb project is dead, the foosic library will expand quite rapidly!

Although I do agree to an extent

Bummer

I'm downloading (maybe the last chance) the latest 7/1/06 db.

It may be full of errors but I can clean them up in EAC before I rip.

Sure beats manually keying in all that info for each rip.

The CDDB protocol's 32 bit CD-TOC checksum was crap anyway.
I'm glad to see MusicBrainz support in CDEx

REAL SHAME - that's a big one leaving the scene...

Thank you guy's at freedb for all your work!!! It's alway been so seamless,
as soon as I put in my CD, EAC had all the album information ready to use
(with some corrections to do sometimes )...

Guess there's not much one can do. There do seem to be times when you
have to let go?!

As for the audio community, let's hope for an alternative to become available
soon. MB looks quite good to me!

Best regards!

That's really sad news. Freedb is brilliant. But I'm sure something will emerge in the not too distant future... it always does right?

---

I've always loved the Discogs system/db. If there was a way for EAC to use that or indeed Music Brainz, then I'd be a happy man. MP3Tag can use both.

Foosic looks cool too. Not sure if that is allowed to be used in EAC though??

I keep mentioning EAC cos as we know that's seemingly still the ripper of choice.

The foosic database grows by collecting playback events, i.e. the client software submits information about the currently playing song - with or without the fingerprint - and this gets added to the database. The lookup protocol to be used with tagging software always uses fingerprints, so just adding data from freedb without fingerprints does not really help to increase the usefulness of foosic as a tagging service.


I fully agree about the disc ID. The "ISO 8859-1" (or rather whatever client software used instead for submitting) legacy entries were pretty annoying as well. At least that's something the freedb2.org developer was working on. According to what he announced on the freedb forums, he had converted all but 30000 entries from local encodings to UTF-8.


Garf was annoyed by the fingerprint used in MusicBrainz being proprietary and deliberately made his fingerprint open-source:

How long does a song need to play for enough info to be gathered and sent to the foosic db?

Would creating a fb2k plugin that 'plays' (for the required minimum time) or indeed simply scans someone's music library to then upload to the foosic db be possible?
Like many people I have a large and well tagged audio collection, and I'd be more than happy to get it into foosic.


Thanks for the info, sounds good.

Musicbrainz used to have a script running to import FreeDB entries automatically, but it was dropped for the reason you give here.


Upcoming versions of the Picard tagger will allow you to be more flexible in the way your music is tagged with the information from the database. It's still a work in progress though.

The threshold for a track to be submitted to foosic.org by foobar2000 (rather the foo_sic component) is 60 seconds, unless the track is shorter. The server has a spam protection, so it will drop submissions that come in too frequent, i.e. less than 25 seconds after the last if I remember correctly. This is because the submission protocol is intended to track playback events, not to submit track metadata en masse. Please see the foosic.org discussion thread in the foobar2000 forum for details.

I too have many thousands of high quality, well tagged audio files, and I could probably contribute substantially to a project like this, if there's a fairly easy, more-or-less automated way to do it.

Obviously something needs to take freedb's place. In a way, it could be a good thing though, because there were a lot of technical limitations to freedb. I like how new systems maybe can support things like cover-art, audio fingerprinting, and libraries of all artists, etc... and would potentially have ways of ensuring better accuracy and correctness of spelling and consistency of formatting, which were big issues with freedb.

Freedb also had way many false positives (and sometimes false negatives).

I guess it's just time to move on. It was nice while it lasted!

Now clearly is a time for a new database to step up. Hopefully this will be a chance for MB to get better support. It would be nice to see MB add the foosic open acoustic fingerprint, for future proofing their database.

Why doesn't this community start up some sort of freedb type project.

Time, money, complex technical issues...

It'd take some pretty fancy programming and such... There are probably already alternatives in the works that could take freedb's place. And there's always gracenote, if needs be, I suppose.

Dam this is sad news, I always prefered freedb over CDDB and AMG.

> am trying to find an organisation that takes the domain and ensures

freedb weekly top 20 clients
1. Nero 1792188
2. CDex 676765
3. Tag&Rename 524235
4. FreeRIP MP3 462734
5. Easy CD-DA Extractor 442345
6. Exact Audio Copy 328667
7. Audiograbber 324872
8. libkcddb 301165
9. dBpowerAMP Music Converter 244666
10. freedbdemo 231942
...

Anyone else think Nero should take it over?

Sure if they promise to remove DAE and audio burning from their software.



(...may I have two seconds of silence by default between my lack of error detection please?)

Man, I never would have thought that so many people use Nero for tagging (and ripping?) their audiofiles. Must be all those OEM versions and some piracy.

Let's hope the pirates aren't using Nero.

Think about the bloatwared computers

I don't think Nero would be the best choice, but they may be interested in freedb. Probably they will be not to eager to implement several solutions into their program without knowing wich one will become dominant.
The numbers inducate that the Nero customers are using this feature, so Ahead needs to provide it to them.
The server infrastructure is already available, so taking over freedb seems to be the easiest solution.

But there are some people involved in Nero around here on HA, maybe they could add something to the topic...

Any comments by André regarding possible alternatives for EAC he might be already considering?