History:FreeDB Gateway

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MusicBrainz to FreeDB Gateway

The MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway (mb2freedb) is a service that allows FreeDB clients to access MB-data through the FreeDB protocol.

How to Access It

The mb2freedb gateway is setup at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab and can be accessed using the following settings:

host freedb.musicbrainz.org
via http
port 80
path /~cddb/cddb.cgi

It should be just a matter of changing the host and possibly the path, 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 edit has been applied, but occasionally it can take longer.

Limitations

  • CD's with data tracks such as videos are supported. But, will return one less track than normally expected from FreeDB. This might cause a problem with some clients.
  • The genre will always be set to Unknown.
  • The year is always set to the first one on the matching database entry. As re-releases with the same track listing are always combined with the original, the year returned might not match that of the disc in hand.
  • 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 disc ID attached, follow the process on HowToAddDiscIDs to add it.

Bug Reporting / Questions

Our BugTracker has a component for mb2freedb, please report all problems there, including as much detail as possible:

If you want to play with the source code, it's here: http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/browser/mb2freedb/trunk/


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