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

[Don Redman]

On Mon, 2 Aug 2004 15:42:35 -0700, Robert Kaye <rob at eorbit.net> wrote:
> In preparing for this change, we're looking at the usefulness of the  
> automatic FreeDB imports (manifested via add album insertions from the  
> freedb moderator). Do you think that these are still useful for us? I've  
> heard a number of people complaining about the duplicate albums being  
> added and people having to vote down the additions.

What is so bad about the freedb auto-imports?
If I am not mistaken, freedb is our only source of disc-IDs. I would not  
want to turn this off before we have a tagger that can calculate disc-IDs.

Except from the "stutter"-bug it is not a bad thing if freedb enters a  
duplicate album.
If I understood the algorithm right, freedb auto-insertions only happen if  
someone requests data via a disc-id and MB does not have this disc-ID but  
freedb does.

Why do you want to keep this information out of MusicBrainz?

Ok, the algorithm is not perfect. Does it ever auto-add a disc-ID if the  
album is in MB but without the disc-ID? I believe it does not do this at  
all.
Instead it adds a duplicate album into MB. But this is one merge-albums  
edit to enter by hand. And it enhances our data.

Or did I get something wrong here?

Thinking laterally, perhaps we should simply exclude freedb from the new  
rule that its edits are accepted after a week, if nobody sees them.  
Perhaps -- assuming that the freedb editor is a stupid robot -- we should  
dicard them after 3 weeks or so instead?

DonRedman