[mb-users] Is it time to stop auto importing from FreeDB?

[Alexander Dupuy]

> Hmmm, you've lost me there.  Automatically adding disc ids?  I can't
> think of anywhere in the system where that happens.

There's no separate moderation type for adding disc ids (that I can find); that 
may be why you are not aware of it.  A bit further on in the wiki page you 
referenced, http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/wiki.pl?AutoInsertFromFreeDB:

> The Auto-Insertion
> 
> This is in two parts:
> 
>     * If the FreeDB album matches an existing album in MB, then the disc ID will be added to that album.
>           o To "match", we look for an artist where the name matches (by name or sortname),
>           o and where the album name matches exactly (case-insensitive),
>           o and where the number of tracks matches.
>           o If we find such an album, we attempt to add the disc ID to that album. Any errors encountered while doing so are silently ignored. 
>     * Otherwise, a new album will be created, as the "FreeDB" moderator

Now it's entirely possible that this is not implemented, but it certainly would 
be useful to have functionality like this.  In fact, if we were to track FreeDB 
ids (e.g. jazz / 620a4509) whenever an album is imported from FreeDB manually 
(not just as a moderation note, but as an indexed database column) that 
information could be used to "match" existing albums in MB even in cases where 
the FreeDB names were totally wrong (or misencoded, or whatever) and the name 
matching would not succeed.

>>> 3. Otherwise, MB does a "fuzzy" lookup on the track lengths (i.e. it
>>> looks for an album in MB which has the same number of tracks, which
>>> has a disc ID, and where the lengths of all the tracks are about the
>>> same). If it finds a matching album, it is returned, and the process
>>> ends.
> 
> 
> Due to patent issues, we'll almost certainly have remove this step.
> We're currently collecting data so we can analyse (in a week or so) how
> much this will actually affect things.

Those software patents are a bitch.  Too bad about that one.  Does the 
Gracenote patent cover only track length fuzziness, or does it also cover the 
kind of name matching described above as well?

@alex