MusicBrainz vs. FreeDB

[Fuga]

This is coming back to the whole GraceNote issue; see http://sbooth.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=108 for more info.

I do not see anything from you in there though. Some questions were asked and never answered (unless I'm mistaken).

Ooops! I hadn't gone all the way down the page and so see the link to the Tracker post. Interesting stuff.

[lhl]

A while back there was a mention of making FreeDB support available again as an option. Is there a build w/ that available?

Would love to be able to give a try as MusicBrainz has been returning some pretty bad results for the discs I'm trying to rip.

(Congrats on Max btw, it looks by-far to be the best option for ripping on the Mac (barring cobbling together a bunch of cdparanoia/cdda2wav scripts together ))

[tomars]

I too would like to see the freedb support back in Max.

[maxlover]

A while back there was a mention of making FreeDB support available again as an option. Is there a build w/ that available?

Would love to be able to give a try as MusicBrainz has been returning some pretty bad results for the discs I'm trying to rip.

Unfortunately, it seems that neither database gives good results for all discs. So the absolute nirvana would perhaps be to have the option to interrogate both, see the results side by side, and choose (track by track) the version one likes the most.

[pragmatik]

I'm in the process of changing the FreeDB support in Max over to MusicBrainz. I have never really used MusicBrainz before, but as can probably be expected, it offers different types of data than FreeDB. I've noticed the following main differences:

• MusicBrainz does not contain any genre information
• MusicBrainz does not contain any composer information
• The release dates are broken down by country

Is the lack of downloadable genre/composer information something that concerns people?

What do you gain from using musicbrainz? why not use freedb?

[sbooth]

What do you gain from using musicbrainz? why not use freedb?

For a while it appeared that FreeDB was going away, hence the switch to MusicBrainz. FreeDB suppport is something that will be added back in at some point in the future.

[pragmatik]

What do you gain from using musicbrainz? why not use freedb?

For a while it appeared that FreeDB was going away, hence the switch to MusicBrainz. FreeDB suppport is something that will be added back in at some point in the future.

OIC. Well, MusicBrainz is growing steadily according to their statistics.

[jhart71]

The quickest option for me is to copy-and-paste the composer information from iTunes (which uses Gracenote) over to Max.

With 2 monitors, it should be that bad . . . better than entering them all by hand later. I'd rather fix them later than to have them be blank.

[RonaldPR]

In any case, I will look into resurrecting the FreeDB code so users will have a choice between MusicBrainz and FreeDB.

Hi Steve,
You wrote this 10 months ago, on January 14th. When will Freedb be available again in Max?
MusicBrainz only knows the most popular CDs. If one owns many less common CDs, like I do, many are not known. Freedb, although certainly not perfect, knew at least most of my CDs and I only needed to do some editing to get the tags right. With MusicBrainz I need to enter all tag info myself for many of my CDs. I all but stopped using Max for ripping CDs, waiting for Freedb to be available again.

[Fuga]

FWIW, the script some of use that is in another thread does work on Leopard with the latest "unstable" build.