Well that was nice while it lasted...

freedb.org is going "out of business" to to personal & professional diagreements between the three main people there. More info here: http://www.freedb.org/index.php

FreeDB was really far from perfect but the program I use to rip my CDs uses it and it worked well enough for me. I wonder what the defacto free CD database will be now?

Sad news.

More info/discussion at Slashdot.

Glad I've got most of my ripping done- the database was a godsend!

Oh well, there's always freedb2...

freedb2 appears to be the closed-source fly in the ointment that has helped the closure of freedb along.

That's terrible! I wonder if there will be a new version of EAC released, but where would it point to?

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

I've just started reripping my mp3s now I've (finally) got a pair of E4Cs to go with my karma. Better get it all done quick, can't be stuck at ~190vbr.

I tried for a long time (granted, it was years ago) to download FreeDB and have EAC pointed to a local folder, but it was so complicated I could never get it going on WinXP. Has anyone had any luck doing this?

EAC set to http://freedb2.org:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi works for me. It looks like the shutdown of Freedb is going to actually speedup the improvements that the Freedb2 guy wants to make.

Tag&Rename has buttons to query both freeDB and AllMusic. Granted, I always used freeDB, but it's good that AllMusic is a backup.

Actually, I'm not sure I ever used the AllMusic database for auto tagging... I hope it actually works.

EAC set to http://freedb2.org:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi works for me

I absolutely could not figure out how to change my EAC database lookup until Attack kindly showed me how in a PM:

Run EAC and press F12

However... in the process of trying to figure it out, I came up with a solution that may be even better than freedb2.

It's a little bit of a kluge, in that you have to start another program and keep it running while you use EAC, but after that it is completely transparent.

The program is called "Player", it is available as a free download here and is tied to the Gracenote database.

Once you have downloaded and installed Player, start the program and select "File/Export Info" and choose cdplayer.ini. That will set cdplayer.ini as the default. Then, in EAC, go to "Database/Get CD Information From" and again choose cdplayer.ini. That will set cdplayer.ini as the default. You only have to do those things once, then they're set forever, or until you change them to something else.

Now, you're all set. As long as the Player program is running, it will go to Gracenote every time you put a CD in your computer, and put the information from the Gracenote database into cdplayer.ini, where EAC will grab it.

I just finished ripping/encoding about 20 CDs with EAC/LAME, and found the quality of the information from Gracenote to be far better than freedb in terms of accuracy, lack of duplicate entries, and above all lack of typographical errors.

Just thought you'd like to know...

tanstaafl.

The reason FreeDB existed in the first place is because people hate Gracenote. It used to be known as CDDB and worked almost exactly like FreeDB did until its shutdown, with user-submitted data. Then someone came along and decided to turn it into a commercial interest, closed down free access to the data, and started making developers pay for the right to use it.

So it's a political and fiscal thing more than anything else.