is there any rival to freedb for number of entrys that does not have the problems of incorrect entrys, crap tagging of various artist cd's, unsynced db's so you have to switch servers and results can be retreived with eac and/or fb2k (just one would be good enough). i have tried freedb2 but it does not seem to have many new cd's and submitting from eac didn't work when i tried.

i suppose i would be willing to use a seperate app to do the tagging if it gave me a big improvement over a freedb based app but it would be nice if it could also apply reply gain as thats all i use foobar for.

Amazon? Discogs? You can access them both using mp3tag.

A good source is also the artists' websites or the album's page on Wikipedia. You will need to add the info manually, but at least you can be sure to get the most accurate album info.

I do that sometimes, and MP3Tag is a big help there, because it has a feature where you can import tag metadata from text files. So instead of typing in all the song names, I copy and paste them from a website into a text file and let MP3Tag import that data through a filter mask I have to create.

Maybe there might be a web source config for MP3Tag and Wikipedia in the future, when the Wikipedians managed to standardize all the album Wiki pages.

tagging from discogs might be ok for the sort of stuff i listen to plus its quite acurate, only downsides i can think of in that are the speed that new cd/vinyl are added and how mix cd's are done on the site might cause problems.

anyone use musicbrainz? is it simply a tagger or more like last.fm/audioscrobbler?

I noticed a company call Get Digital Data is offering a lookup database (GD3). Here is a link to the site:

Get Digital Data

I did some searching through their database and it appears they have a very extensive catalog with cover art. It appears they sell automated ripping software that is backended by this database. I've been looking other software that uses the database, but haven't found anything yet.

MusicBrainz is an user-maintained music database, in the fist place. But you can use it to tag your files using one of the MB taggers, CDex, some linux players, Mp3Tag (with an additional web service source), ... or the CDDB gateway and any Freedb-enabled application.

Hm, that's an interesting thing!

An update to this....

This is now a category on the MusicBrainz Bug Tracker to use for any issues found instead of sending an email directly to me.

Some artists seem reasonably well covered, but others are non existant or missing key releases that I would expect to be there. I certainly wouldn't call it extensive. Yes, they do have cover art, but if the album you want to tag isn't in their database or has mistakes it is not useful.

I'm not sure how many entries they have, but I did quite a bit of checking and found good results. I'm sure to your point there are holes though. What I found interesting was the quality of the returns. Something that struck me was the classical, when i searched by "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart" for composers. Not that I could go through everything, but as I scrolled through the results and the consistancy in the album names was interesting. Out of curiousity I went to the Gracenote search site and did the same thing. First you can't even search by composer at Gracenote, but when searching by artist, it was a bunch of hodge podge returns.

I think its difficult to identify a "most" reliable single source. I looked at quite a few of the resources available. My opinion is that the best way to address the problem is to be able to quickly retrieve, compare, and select the data from multiple sources - more here http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=12424