
FreeDB Is Shutting Down - big_chungus
http://www.freedb.org/en/
======
jacquesm
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.

~~~
zozbot234
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.

~~~
Avamander
MusicBrainz Picard can look up discs based on the ToC and disc ID. Other
software can implement the algorithm used by MusicBrainz if they wish:
[https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Disc_ID_Calculation](https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Disc_ID_Calculation)

They do also store FreeDB disc IDs, for example:
[https://musicbrainz.org/cdtoc/lwHl8fGzJyLXQR33ug60E8jhf4k-](https://musicbrainz.org/cdtoc/lwHl8fGzJyLXQR33ug60E8jhf4k-)

------
tomc1985
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?

~~~
scarejunba
Why not offer to buy it?

~~~
jacquesm
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
I certainly believe this but thread OP does not.

------
hamiltont
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
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.

~~~
sixtyfourbits
I made a torrent:

    
    
      magnet:?xt=urn:btih:96208ba12ca7ffdac5b5adccf1a41e484de94f4a&dn=freedb&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.tiny-vps.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.torrentyorg.pl%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fexplodie.org%3A6969%2Fannounce
    

This includes all the files from your mirror except for the older database
backups and the "latest" directory (which is just the extracted version of
cddbd-1.5.2.tar.gz).

~~~
jacquesm
Thank you for making this, I will seed the torrent for a couple of weeks or
until it looks like nobody is downloading it anymore.

------
alrs
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)

------
Scoundreller
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
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.

------
NelsonMinar
How is MusicBrainz doing? The blog has recent updates, that's a good sign.
[https://musicbrainz.org/](https://musicbrainz.org/)

~~~
iruoy
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-a17fb...](https://musicbrainz.org/artist/5347c7dc-a8bd-4a05-8ae1-a17fb1e6a388/edits)

------
creeble
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
Okay, to answer my own question:

[https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/discid/I5l9cCSFccLKFEKS.7wqSZAo...](https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/discid/I5l9cCSFccLKFEKS.7wqSZAorPU-?fmt=json)

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...](https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/8e061dc4-790e-4587-ba53-011e7852f88d?inc=recordings&fmt=json)

and you'll get the track data. Not quite sure how to get the album art yet,
but should follow.

~~~
Freso
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.)

------
spondyl
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
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
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.

------
dehrmann
Seeing FreeDB reminds me of Audiograbber.

~~~
LeoPanthera
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
Good old times, indeed. The Kali website seems even literally to be stuck in
the past ([http://kali.net/](http://kali.net/)).

Nostlagia.

------
gamesbrainiac
For a second there I thought it was FreeBSD.

------
ianlevesque
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
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
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
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)

------
The_rationalist
I first read it as freeBSD!!

~~~
dang
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
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.

~~~
dang
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
Make sense, what do you think about negative meaning comments ?

~~~
dang
I'd have to see specific examples to say anything meaningful.

~~~
The_rationalist
Here's the list of argument patterns
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Formal_fal...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Formal_fallacies)

