Identifying Audio Files with MusicBrainz (O'Reilly) [LWN.net]

Paul Mison shows how to access the MusicBrainz audio CD database with Perl. "During 1999 and 2000, however, the CDDB (after its acquisition by Gracenote) moved from an open position (with GPLed downloads of its data files) to a proprietary one. During this time it stopped access to clients speaking the first version of the CDDB protocol, and instead moved to licensing -- at some cost -- CDDB2 clients, and stopped offering downloads of its data. However, a few projects started up, taking advantage of the data that had been freely available until this point. One of these was FreeDB, which quickly established an open replacement for the CDDB. The other is MusicBrainz, which is much more interesting."

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Identifying Audio Files with MusicBrainz (O'Reilly)

Posted Oct 16, 2003 17:27 UTC (Thu) by sab39 (guest, #2185) [Link]

MusicBrainz is Damn Cool, but I have one major problem with it: the server software is decidedly non-free (at least according to their website a couple of months ago - I expect LWN would have trumpeted it if this had changed) and besides that, not even available binary-only at any price.

Besides ethical considerations (which I don't take lightly) this has one major practical implication: if MusicBrainz ever shuts down their central server, the software becomes completely useless unless someone can reverse engineer exactly what the server must be doing based on what the client does.

This isn't a theoretical problem: a MusicBrainz competitor called Songprint did exactly that. Various web archives actually do make it possible to still find the Songprint client code, but with the "freetantrum.org" servers long dead, it's the software equivalent of a doorstop - good for nothing except taking up hard-drive space.

I'd like nothing more than to be able to make use of the functionality of MusicBrainz (I've even considered working on integrating it into iRATE Radio, a free music-finding program). But without the assurance that the server software will remain available indefinitely, I can't in good conscience write code that relies on it.

Any audio-gurus interested in writing a free replacement?