History:FreeDB Gateway

MusicBrainz to CDDB Gateway

The MusicBrainz to CDDB gateway (mb2cddb) is a service that allows CDDB/FreeDB clients to access MB-data through the CDDB protocol.

How to Access It

The mb2cddb gateway is setup on inhouseuk's test/development server and can be accessed using the following settings:

host www.mb.inhouse.co.uk
via http
port 80
path /~cddb/cddb.cgi

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

Limitations

• CD's with data tracks such as videos, will never return a match. This is because freedb clients always count the data track and include it in the query, thus resulting in one more track than stored in MusicBrainz. This is impossible to fix.
• The genre will always be set to Unknown.
• Currently the year is not being set.
• 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 mb2cddb, please report all problems there, including as much detail as possible:

• Problem seen
• Software and version
• The album url, eg: http://musicbrainz.org/album/b84ee12a-09ef-421b-82de-0441a926375b.html
• The freedb id if you have it
• approximate date/time, preferably in GMT/UTC so inhouseuk can check against his logs.

inhouseuk will also surely answer any further questions about the service. ;)

If you want to play with the source code, it's here: http://svn.musicbrainz.org/mb2cddb/trunk/.