Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Change the cddb server in rhythmbox settings.

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2014-12-29 at 18:35 +1000, Jonathan Matthew wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 at 07:36:38PM -0700, jd1008 wrote:
> > On 12/27/2014 06:56 PM, Jonathan Matthew wrote:
> > > On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 at 09:22:45AM -0700, jd1008 wrote:
> > > > I am writing to ask you to allow the user to change which cd database
> > > > rhythmbox should use to identify music CD's.
> > > > I have CD's that are not recognizable by your hard coded cd database server.
> > > Rhythmbox uses the musicbrainz API to retrieve CD track information.  Are there
> > > alternate servers that support the musicbrainz API?  I'm not aware of any.
> > > Have you considered submitting your CDs to the musicbrainz database?
> > there is the freedb.org and there is the cddb.org's databases.
> > I do not know about what api's each database uses. cdda2wav,
> > a command line program, lets you select via args which database
> > to use. So how does IT connect to a database of the user's choice?
> > Does it know about all the api's of the different music cd databases?
>
> It looks like all the cddb-like services use the same API.  From what
> I remember, the musicbrainz servers will make requests to one of them and
> return the data to you if the album isn't in the musicbrainz database, but
> the quality of the results is bad enough that rhythmbox ignores them entirely.

That fallback code doesn't exist anymore. The quality of CDDB databases
is usually pretty awful (no peer reviews, no voting, etc.) and the
hashing code was such that the identifier weren't so unique either.

> > Could you adopt cdda2wav's way of connecting to any database the
> > user selects?
>
> I don't think I'm going to work on the CD ripping code ever again.
> I'd probably accept a patch to add a cddb client, as long as it was strictly
> opt-in.

If some databases contained useful information, I'd find a way of
seeding Musicbrainz with it, rather than relying on an ancient and now
obsolete protocol (which doesn't support things like Composers, duos,
multiple releases of the same disc, etc. Any sort of modern metadata).

FWIW, I created an account on Musicbrainz some time ago, and if a CD is
unknown, I usually just have to add it as a new "release" on the
website, and reload the tracks for it to show up with the correct
metadata. It's a better experience than any CDDB front-end in my
experience.

Cheers