I ran a similar service for years (daz.com) and eventually shut it down because musicbrainz was not worth competing with though I think we did a better job of tying the links between the various bands by tracking artists from one act to another, also studio artists which made it quite nice for music discovery.
Apologies, but it feels so strange to me to see FreeDB framed as being "in competition" with anything. It was designed to do exactly one thing: continue a community-focused and technically-compatible version of CDDB after that project pulled a bait-and-switch in the late '90s by taking the data that was generously- and freely-submitted by users and then spinning themselves into the for-profit Gracenote LLC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History
I'm sorry you found it unsustainable, but from what I can find about Daz it seems to have been pretty much the same idea as Gracenote: take the data submitted by users out of their desire to share alike, lock it up, and then commercialize it by putting a bunch of semi-related functionality around it. Assuming this link is the correct Daz, anyway, it talks about mp3 downloads, used CD shopping, artist exclusives, and other things I was always very glad FreeDB didn't want to be:
"Visitors and members can search for all kinds of music related information and listen to ten thousands various samples. DAZ.com offers members a free mp3 to download every day (see homepage) and two RSS feeds: the free mp3 of the day and the updates from last 24 hours. Feel free to point your reader to this feeds.
In the near future we will add more community features, create a better user-interface and offer a second hand cd-spot. At the moment I am contacting with signed and unsigned artists to discuss ways of working together."
It's the correct link but it never did any of that beyond some trials, the free mp3 download was a promo given to us for free by bands that wanted to be highlit, I think we did three of those or so before canning it, it just didn't feel right, but some people really liked it, and it might have been a way to generate some revenue without bugging the users.
Daz was essentially a wiki which allowed people to link artists, bands and media. Unfortunately we never got to the point where we got permission to stream media, but plenty of artists thought that was what we were doing (we just did the legal maximum sample that you could distribute under fair use). I can't count the number of angry 'cease-and-desist' letters that we received, invariably followed by sheepish apologies that they never actually downloaded anything from the site. But some artists really liked it and it was quite interesting to be 'pen pals' with some of the very well known names in the industry.
The whole reason I built it because I saw the writing on the wall with Gracenote, I contributed plenty to CDDB and suddenly saw my own work be used for profit.
Maybe instead of looking at a blog have a look at the archive.org snapshots of the website over time, they give a much better picture. I also built a media player / file sharing client that used daz.com for the meta data called mxchg.com.
But music on the web is very hard to make work as a long term thing, the bills have to be paid and even if the content is user generated you still need to supervise it and ensure that people don't pull tricks to vandalize it or destroy it.
I'm very much impressed with how Musicbrainz has been able to keep it clean, free and have such stamina, that's serious dedication.
> But music on the web is very hard to make work as a long term thing, the bills have to be paid and even if the content is user generated you still need to supervise it and ensure that people don't pull tricks to vandalize it or destroy it.
Absolutely, and it's thankless work too, like how the #1 user-agent string on FreeDB's statistics page is "FreedbDemo" straight from their example code project. Moderation is more necessary now, though, with the Musicbrainz/Discogs paradigm where there's one canonical "correct" listing for every artist/album/whatever. One of my favorite parts of FreeDB/CDDB (and one of the reasons I use it to this day) is how many albums have multiple user-submitted entries that fit different tagging styles. I totally get how some people would consider that a downside, and it still doesn't preclude vandals crapflooding you with bogus garbage entries, but I don't consider a lot of the MB/Discogs tagging guidelines to be especially good. Any tag source I use—including the paid GD3—is guaranteed to need at least a little editing, and I find that FreeDB gets me closer to my ideal tagging format more often than any of the others.
That makes good sense. Tagging consistency was a nightmare to get right and even though we did an ok job at it I was never 100% satisfied. If you want I can probably still dig up our database somewhere as a mysql dump and get it over to you. There might be something useful in there.
I was toying with reading/writing my EAC database file a few months ago, and this news reinvigorated my interest in getting something nice and local running to serve all my new and (many) old clients.
We run our own FreeDB server at OneMusicAPI which we use to combine with other data.
If anyone is inconvenienced by the FreeDB shutdown and needs some short term service to get them by, while they work out what else to do, send us an email and we can see if we can open our FreeDB server.
Sorry, musicbrainz would be good if there were any good interface to enter data. A good part of my CDs is from independent Brazillian musicians. They have no data in musicbrainz and the interfaces to fill it are a pain in ...
Does musicbrainz support the 'Disc ID' tags that FreeDB uses?
Also, ISTM that it should be quite feasible for musicbrainz to track artists and "acts", in a pinch by cross-referencing wikidata.org which acts as a sort of shared focus for the whole Linked-Open-Data metaverse.
MusicBrainz Picard can look up discs based on the ToC and disc ID. Other software can implement the algorithm used by MusicBrainz if they wish: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Disc_ID_Calculation
MusicBrainz has its own format of disc ID (checksum of an entire audio disc), plus per-track fingerprints.
Artist credits can be tracked -- there are extremely fine-grained relationship models -- but most entries don't have the associated metadata because it's a hassle to input.
Disc ID's weren't perfect, you can make a pretty easy mapping between the two if you want. But software still in maintenance really should switch to musicbrainz (and probably should have switched long ago).
For my own system I used a music fingerprint written by Giancarlo Pascutto (I hope I spelled that right, it's ages ago), which used a really nice algorithm that did not see a single collision in a very large number of tracks.
https://musicbrainz.org/
I ran a similar service for years (daz.com) and eventually shut it down because musicbrainz was not worth competing with though I think we did a better job of tying the links between the various bands by tracking artists from one act to another, also studio artists which made it quite nice for music discovery.