Does Anyone Know What Happened to CDDB?

[BassPig]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I would guess there are a few folks here familiar with CD audio extraction programs like AudioCatalyst, et al, and as such, I have a question that perhaps some of you have run into of late:

I have many CDs in my collection that I ripped years ago. At the time, the track titles were found on the CDDB database and automatically inserted into the file names when saved to disk.

This year, all of my formerly-found CDs are now coming up "Sorry, the disc was not found". I was wondering why that is? Has the big database had a hard disk crash and loss of massive amounts of disc title info, or has some other thing caused my discs to no longer be in the national database?

Edit: It seems that only US domestic discs are found now. My Japanese anime CDs are all coming up 'not found' since this year started. Is there another database that I can link into AudioCatalyst so that it can read my Japanese discs again like it used to?

[foxyshadis]

Can your ripper use FreeDB or MusicBrainz? Both of those had the international albums I could quickly find to test with.

[LANjackal]

Try FreeDB instead.

[BassPig]

Can your ripper use FreeDB or MusicBrainz? Both of those had the international albums I could quickly find to test with.

I'm afraid not. It seems that CDDB is hard coded into Audio Catalyst. A "get List" button calls up only one site (used to be three), us.cddb.com.

I went to CDDB.com and was redirected to Gracenote. Apparently some things have changed around there.

Anyone know how to change the site that AC uses to find disc tracks?

EDIT:

I hacked the AudioCatalyst.ini file as follows:

CDDBServer=freedb.org
CDDBHTTPPath=/~freedb/cddb.cgi
CDDBLocation=Random US site
CDDBTCPIPPort=8880
CDDBConnectVia=TCP/IP
UseProxy=False

This doesn't result in auto retrieval, but I can press the CDDB button and the program will find the tracks on the two Japanese disks that were formerly not found.
I changed the path to the CGI script on the longshot guess that maybe freedb uses the same named cgi script to pull up disc data. It works!

[Blue_MiSfit]

Good old AC :) That was the first CD Ripper I ever used - along with its built in MP3 encoder at 128kbps. I can still listen to those ancient files (KoRn CDs from 1998!)

[BassPig]

Good old AC :) That was the first CD Ripper I ever used - along with its built in MP3 encoder at 128kbps. I can still listen to those ancient files (KoRn CDs from 1998!)

Well call me a Luddite, but I am still running Windows 2000 and haven't bought very many new applications since 2002. I figure, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." :)

I have CDs dating back to 1983, when I got my first CD player and the format was the 'latest and greatest'. I bought my last regular CD around 1999, with rare exceptions for some of the more outstanding Japanese anime soundtracks.

[Arachnotron]

CDDB, which is now owned/ run by Gracenote, has recently been the subject of an edit war on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote). The article probably also explains what has changed in CDDB to cause the behavior you noticed.

[BassPig]

Thanks for the Wiki link. A fascinating chronology of lawsuits!
Even more perplexing though, is the article about the new alliance between Gracenote and Japan! There is no reference to why the Japanese CDs are no longer in the database however.

Another fascinating, yet unrelated finding in the Wiki article, is one which settles a dispute I had with a friend who claimed that his CD-Rs made from analog recordings from cassette tapes of songs, came up properly identified in CDDB. The Wiki article explained this, and now I understand that my friend was not embellishing the facts about this.

But the mystery remains, why no Japanese CDs in CDDB today?
Fortunately, I have made freedb work with AudioCatalyst, so I'm good.

[krisq]

and you can try AudioGrabber (http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/) which uses freedb, lame and has VERY similiar interface to AC.

[BassPig]

I have AudioGrabber on my video editing workstation, which uses Win XP. But I'm reluctant to install it here on this machine because LAME is a much slower encoder, although the quality is better. I'll have to give it some thought and maybe reconsider.

[foxyshadis]

The latest 3.98 betas are faster than the old ones, -V3 is 20x, -V3 -f is 23x, and -b 160 -f is 30x. There's also a -q 9 that's twice as fast as -f (-q 7). (The latest oggenc2 runs at 85x realtime with no tweaking.) Just remember that -f loses a little quality, and any other mp3 encoder is extremely inferior to lame in quality per bitrate.