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Databases Music The Internet

Freedb.org Is Shutting Down (freedb.org) 35

Posted by BeauHD from the fun-while-it-lasted dept.
AmiMoJo writes: Freedb, the community-generated database of music CD metadata, is shutting down on March 31, 2020. The service was set up as a free alternative to CDDB. Many CD-ripping applications pull metadata from Freedb to save the user having to type it in manually, but the service has some major limitations and has now been superseded by MusicBrainz. This wouldn't be the first time Freedb shut down. In 2006, the site shut down due to a disagreement among its developers, only to be brought back to life a few months later.

It's unclear why Freedb is shutting down after all these years.
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Freedb.org Is Shutting Down More

Freedb.org Is Shutting Down

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  • "It's unclear why Freedb is shutting down..." (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02, 2020 @09:16PM (#59790010)

    "... the service has some major limitations and has now been superseded by MusicBrainz."

    It's like the summary doesn't read itself.

    • "... the service has some major limitations and has now been superseded by MusicBrainz."

      It's like the summary doesn't read itself.

      Those two statements are not at odds with each other. Having something superseded doesn't change the fact that MusicBrainz is still in major use and hasn't changed the equation for running the service.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I wrote the summary but not the "it's unclear why" bit. To be fair they don't offer any hint as to why they are doing it, we can only guess. It must cost money to run with no real way to monetize it, and since MusicBrainz is getting all the love now...

      The main issue is that they decided they wanted to be CDDB compatible, but CDDB has some problems like not supporting the "composer" field that is vital for classical music. MusicBrainz doesn't bother with compatibility.

      MusicBrainz also has some mechanisms for

  • Unclear? (Score:5, Funny)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @09:16PM (#59790012)

    It's unclear why Freedb is shutting down after all these years.

    Maybe because the service has some major limitations and has now been superseded by MusicBrainz?

    • Damn, AC beat me to it by a few seconds.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )

      Maybe others were not so quick to dump it, but once I'd switched to MusicBrainz in 2006, I never went back. And these days, all my purchases come pre-tagged, so I don't really have a call to use it any more.

      • Which makes the question asked still completely valid - why *now*? It seems that these major limitations haven’t suddenly cropped up, nor has Freedb suddenly been make obsolete by an alternative overnight, both of those things are long-standing issues, so why *now*?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Which makes the question asked still completely valid - why *now*? It seems that these major limitations havenâ(TM)t suddenly cropped up, nor has Freedb suddenly been make obsolete by an alternative overnight, both of those things are long-standing issues, so why *now*?

          A few possible reasons

          1) Traffic to the database has dropped off enough that you don't need extensive hosting
          2) Traffic is very light
          3) User submissions are basically non-existent now so the database is out of date
          4) Hosting bill is comi

    • Maybe because the service has some major limitations and has now been superseded by MusicBrainz?

      Superseded in what way? Certainly not for the many existing applications which continue to use FreeDB. Just because something is fancy and new doesn't mean an older system should be shutdown.

      Be a Moran not a Moron, you're giving the ever update addicted millennials a bad name.

      • Superseded in what way?

        I don't know! I just found it funny that the summary gave a possible explanation, followed by the "It's unclear why Freedb is shutting down" comment of Beau4K.

    • And if you want to tag your existing music, use https://picard.musicbrainz.org... [musicbrainz.org]

  • Meanwhile on their website: (Score:3)

    by acoustix ( 123925 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @09:19PM (#59790034)

    "Continuation of the free database guaranteed"

    They might want to update their webpage.

  • That sucks (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @09:34PM (#59790068)
    I use freedb all of the time. Every time I rip a CD (which is frequently). My tagging tool doesn't even use MusicBrainz. I'd be very curious to read why this project was forked, because I wasn't aware of any freedb "limitations".

    • As far as I knew MusicBrainz wasn't forked from anything, didn't "supersede" anything, and doesn't even do exactly what CDDB/FreeDB did. Those were strictly for holding data about CD releases. MusicBrainz covers all kinds of recordings/releases with unique IDs, and other things I don't remember as I haven't used it in a long time.

  • It's official (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It is official; Netcraft confirms: FreeBD is dying

  • How big could the database be? A few gigs, maybe 10 at best? That could be run from the most modest of hardware today.

  • According to the statistics on their site they had approximately 4.5 million requests last year. So it's obviously in use... Source: http://www.freedb.org/en/stati... [freedb.org]

    • It sounds like the developers want this thing dead. If I'm wrong about that, drop me a line - we could definitely host that.

  • Well that sucks (Score:3)

    by kalpol ( 714519 ) on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @11:18AM (#59791722)
    Cdex v1.5 is still one of the best CD rippers out there, was nice to pull the titles from FreeDB. I hope someone saves the database, it's got just about everything on CD.

  • Let's say I have a ripper that uses freedb. I'd like to convert to musicbrainz. Is musicbrainz compatible? Can I just change my config from:
    freedb.freedb.org/~cddb/cddb.cgi
    to something else?

  • I'm not sure why my blog is linked from the date - I wrote a blog post about it, but I am not affiliated with freedb in any way. The freedb.org webpage has a notice about it (which is what made me discover it). It seems like Musicbrainz had a freedb-compatible gateway that closed down in 2019 ( https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/H... [musicbrainz.org] ) and now Freedb itself is closing down. I don't have any information about any replacement, but there's contact information on http://freedb.org/ [freedb.org] .
  • F in the discussion boys

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