Freedb
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The correct title of this article is freedb. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
freedb is a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content is under the GNU General Public License. It was originally based on the now-proprietary CDDB (compact disc database). As of April 24, 2006, the database holds just under 2,000,000 CDs.[1] To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculates a nearly unique disc ID and then queries the database. If the disc is in the database, the client is able to retrieve and display the artist, album title, tracklist and some additional information.
On July 1, 2006, two of the main freedb developers resigned.[2]. Although this caused much worrying over the future of the project, it was announced on July 7, 2006[3] that plans were in place that would most likely find freedb a new home and it would continue its operation as normal.
On October 4, 2006, freedb owner Michael Kaiser announced[4] that Magix had acquired freedb.
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[edit] Motivation
The original software behind CDDB was released under the GNU General Public License, and many people submitted CD information without charging anything, thinking the service would also remain free. The license was later changed, however, and some programmers complained that the new license included certain terms that they couldn't accept: if one wanted to access CDDB, one was not allowed to access any other CDDB-like database (such as freedb), and any programs using a CDDB lookup had to display a CDDB logo while performing the lookup.[5]
In March 2001, CDDB, now owned by Gracenote, banned all unlicensed applications from accessing their database. New licenses for CDDB1 (the original version of CDDB) were no longer available, since Gracenote wanted to force programmers to switch to CDDB2 (a new version incompatible with CDDB1 and hence with freedb).[5]
The license change motivated the freedb project, which is intended to remain free (both as in beer and as in speech).
Another project sparked by the license change (and since broadened beyond a mere database of CDs) is called MusicBrainz.
freedb is used primarily by media player, cataloguer, audio taggers and CD ripper software. As of version 6 of the freedb protocol, freedb accepts and returns UTF-8 data.
[edit] References
- ^ Massive duplicate cleanup completed. freedb. Retrieved on May 9, 2006.
- ^ The future of freedb. Retrieved on July 2, 2006.
- ^ Updates in recent developments with freedb. Retrieved on July 8, 2006.
- ^ MAGIX acquires freedb. Retrieved on October 5, 2006.
- ^ a b Why freedb.org?. freedb. Retrieved on May 9, 2006.
