Freedb good news! (was [mb-users] FreeDB bad news)

[Steve Wyles]

On Sun, 2 Jul 2006, teknojnky wrote:

> http://www.freedb.org/
>
> Appears to be gone or going soon.
>
According to the latest news, freedb is going to continue.

However, whilst the fate of freedb was undecided, Lukas Lalinsky quickly 
wrote some server based code that allows freedb enabled clients to obtain 
data from Musicbrainz. He is currently on holiday and in his absence, I 
have fixed a few incompatability issues and it now seems to work as 
expected with most freedb enabled applications.

It does however, need a little more testing.

Limitations!
------------

CD's with data tracks such as videos, will *never* return a match. This is 
because freedb clients always count the data track and include it in the 
query, thus resulting in one more track than stored in MusicBrainz. This 
is impossible to fix.

The genre will always be set to Unknown.

Currently the year is not being set.

Data is always returned in UTF-8 to cater with extended character sets. 
For most albums, this isn't a problem. But, for full compatability a 
freedb client that supports protocol version 6 is required. If the 
characters look garbled in your freedb enabled application, this is 
probably the reason why.

Obviously only albums on MusicBrainz with discids attached will return 
matches!

If the album you want to check doesn't have your discid attached, follow 
the process on http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/HowToAddDiscIDs to add it.

How to access it
----------------

The mb2cddb gateway is setup on my test/development server and can be 
accessed using the following settings.

host www.mb.inhouse.co.uk
via http
port 80
path ~cddb/cddb.cgi

It should be just a matter of changing the host, as the other settings are 
standard for most applications.

Because the gateway is running on a mirror server, any changes made on the 
main musicbrainz site will take time to propagate, normally this is no 
more than a hour after the mod has been applied, but occasionally it can 
take longer.

Bug reporting / Questions
-------------------------

At the moment, please report any issues back to me via email, including as 
much detail as possible.

* Problem seen
* Software and version
* The album url

eg: 
http://musicbrainz.org/album/b84ee12a-09ef-421b-82de-0441a926375b.html

* The freedb id if you have it
* approximate date/time, preferably in GMT/UTC so I can check against my 
logs.

Have fun!

Steve (inhouseuk)