Hi

I have the latest version of foobar2000 installed (0.9.4.1), and have been trying to rip the tracks from a particular CD of mine. Thing is, I can't get foobar2000's freedb tool to recognise the CD and its tracks. Weird thing is I tried it with Audiograbber's freedb tool... and to my surprise this CD was actually located instantly... it's the CD accompanying the "Piano for Dummies" book by Blake Neeley

I tried both File > Open Audio CD > Rip > Lookup (source Freedb) and also File > Open Audio CD > Play > Select All > Right Click > Tagging > Get tags from freedb.

In both cases, nothing was found.

I tried using the freedb.freedb.org settings from Audiograbber without success -- port 8880 path /~cddb/cddb.cgi (although not sure about User email address -- used the default user@foobar2000.org).

As far as I can see, Audiograbber isn't using any other database source, so I'm perplexed as to why foobar2000 can't find this CD where Audiograbber can.

Thanks!

Mike

Edit: I should add that with more common CDs, freedb tagging works fine with foobar2000. I suspect it's just different databases used by foobar2000 and Audiograbber, but it would be good if I could set foobar2000 to use Audiograbber's external database because that found this pretty obscure CD. (And I like foobar2000's native support for musepack so I'd much rather stick with foobar2000 for everything.)

Add freedb.freedb.org with port 80 as new server in the preferences and select it.

freedb2.org does not have the latest albums from freedb

Here are the settings in the new server:



And this is how I select all tracks, and right-click to get to the freedb tool:



And this is the error I still get, even using that server:



Thanks,

Mike

I get the same problem sometimes, loading the same files into mp3tag and using it's freedb function with the same server always works (of course this is no use for a CD you haven't ripped yet). Perhaps this is a bug in the freedb plugin for foobar2000?

Your images are unavailable: "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded"

Sorry guys and gals. I first tried uploading the images to my unlimited smugmug account, but that was playing up big time, so I sent them to my limited personal server. Looks like I hit the download limit this month. They'll mysteriously start showing again next month.

Anyhow, the three images weren't too informative really:

The first one just showed that (hopefully) I was using the right server settings: freedb.freedb.org; port 80; /cddb/cddb.cgi (with email address still user@foobar2000.org -- that doesn't matter?). I left the default freedb2 choice still in the list, but the freedb choice I added was highlighted.

The second one just showed that to use the freedb tool I just highlighted all tracks (Ctrl-A), then right clicked to get through to Tagging and Get tags from freedb.

The last one just showed a window that popped up showing the whole list of tracks, with a message against each to the effect that it couldn't be found on freedb.

(Same problem when I accessed the freedb tool from the lookup button on the CD ripping window rather than from the CD playing screen.)

Anyway, looks like david_dl has seen this before, so perhaps it's something that needs looking into? In the meantime, I think I can cope with unnamed tracks ripped from my Piano for Dummies CD

Thanks,

Mike

Edit: BTW I tried going back to v 0.8.3 and using messer's freedb plugin -- that found the track names OK for this CD (although not without throwing up a weird stream of what looked like error messages).

By the way, I get this error all the time when using MusicBrainz's passthrough cddb server:



Host: www.mb.inhouse.co.uk
Port: 80
Path: /~cddb/cddb.cgi
Description: MusicBrainz CDDB gateway

I might try MusicBrainz and see what I get. Probably the same.

BTW, if I set up several alternative servers in the foobar2000 list, will it try each in turn to find all matches, or only the highlighted one? The user interface isn't that clear on this point IIRC -- there is a highlighted entry, but it doesn't make it clear whether this is the only/default server that will be used.

Thanks,

Mike

AFAIK this service only works with real audio cds, not already encoded files.


Only the highlighted server.
BTW you can check the foobar console to see what server was actually used.

It often works with encoded files as well, but you still need to select the whole album. It won't work for single tracks (unless you have single-track CDs).

[rant]
The developer's post is always very "informative", is it?
[/rant]

Can't help it but sometimes I really wonder why the developer of foobar's answer is sometimes hard for us to understand or just the last thing we wanna know.

Oh, I've used it with my FLAC full-file albums too. It was just an example. Just never works. :/

The reason it doesn't work is because fb2k is attempting something non-standard. As a previous poster already stated, the MB cddb gateway is designed to work with physical CD's.

fb2k generates an artificial CD table of contents from the audio files and uses that in the query, it just happens freedb does a fuzzy match for queries and will generally return the correct result (does it work with freedb2?).

The MB cddb gateway doesn't perform fuzzy matching. As a patent for fuzzy matching on CD's identifiers is held by Gracenote, I would prefer not to challenge that patent.