https://imgur.com/a/KHc3vV9I borrowed a newish, probably 2021, Toyota Camry yesterday. On the bottom of the giant screen that cool new cars have was a blast from my past: a tiny logo for a company called Gracenote. I hadn’t thought about them in more than a decade, but oh, what drama they created among nerds ripping CDs in the late 1990s.

The Dark Ages

In days of yore, the early 1990s, we did not stream our music on demand; we didn't have pervasive wireless internet access. We didn't even buy our music as digital downloads. We had to walk uphill, both ways, to purchase metal that someone had pounded dents into. Microscope dents on aluminum suspended in plastic that we spun around hundreds of times per second. This primitive technology was known as "compact discs" or "CDs".

While an improvement over preceding technologies of rust covered plastic film or dents in vinyl, CDs were still limited. In particular, there was no "metadata": information about the music. Metadata includes stuff like the artist, the title of the album, the names of the songs, the year of release, and the genre. The label printed on the CD would usually tell you the artist and album title. If you still had the case it came in, that would probably have the rest of the information. But none of it was computer friendly, you had to read it with your eyes! Your poor CD player could only say “Track 01” because that’s all it knew.

Also, if you wanted to pick from lots of different albums, you needed to swap CDs, or get a multi-disc CD player, which was expensive and large.

Truly, they were hard times.

But we were on the cusp of a renaissance! In the mid-1990s, the forward thinking realized that the future was storing music as files one could copy around. Mind you, portable MP3 players were still years away, but you could keep dozens of albums on your computer to play on the (likely crap) speakers attached to it. So “ripping” was invented to extract the music from the CD and place it onto a computer's "hard disk" (a spinning piece of metal covered in rust). As "hard disks" were quite small and music quite large, so you might only be able to hold a few albums. To solve this, we compressed the music so it would be smaller. With 1995’s release of WinPlay3 MP3 became the rising star in audio compression. (Ironically, MP3 was originally intended to be used for audio in a video file. Its use for pure audio was an afterthought.) With MP3 compression, you could get dozens of albums on your hard drive!

However, creating MP3s is hard. For example, around 1998 I had access to a cutting edge, incredibly expensive, incredibly powerful DEC Alpha workstation, running at blistering 0.5 Ghz or so. (In comparison, I've got a 2.0 Ghz phone in my pocket right now.) Using it, I could encode 60 minutes of music into MP3 is a mere... 30 minutes. (The laptop I'm typing this on can encode an hour of music into an MP3 in about 30 seconds.)

Anyway, when one ripped CDs, you again ran into the “no metadata” problem. Instead of “Los del Rio - Fiesta Macarena - 01 - Macarena Bayside Boys Remix.mp3” we just got “track-01.mp3”. If you wanted to know the song, artist, or album, you had to add that information manually. That was kinda a pain in the ass, especially when ripping a large collection of CDs. Did I mention it was the dark ages?

A ray of 780 nm light

Around 1993/1994 Ti Kan was creating a CD player called xmcd for Linux and other Unix-like systems.

xmcd is Free Software, available under the GNU Public License (GPL), which is designed to protect user rights. The spirit of Free Software and the GPL is, in part, a sort of digital right-to-repair, including the right to replace parts of it so it can do things the user wants that the original developer didn’t expect or potentially even want. I mention this because foreshadowing.

Anyway, Kan wanted xmcd to be able to tell you what song you were listening to, but was thwarted by the lack of metadata on CDs. But he had an important realization: the combination of disc length, track lengths, and number of tracks was unique, or at least unique-ish for a given CD. So you could combine that information into a simple code and maintain a database mapping from the code to metadata!

It wasn't perfect. Sometimes different albums would have the same code. While a shame, in practice you never had to pick between more than a handful of choices. And sometimes the "same" album would have multiple ever so slightly different versions, so the database would often need multiple entries to handle them.

Then there was the big challenge: where does the metadata come from? Music companies weren’t going to hand that out, partially because they hated the idea of giving away anything for free (they still think lyrics are Super Valuable), and partially because they probably didn't actually keep it; prior to this point no one cared.

So Kan just started collecting the data from his own CDs. When he shared his database, if you found a CD missing from the database, you could email him the info and he would add it. This scaled... poorly. There are millions of albums in the world, and I expect Kan wanted to do things other than copy information out of his email into a database. So in 1995, with some help from Steve Scherf and Graham Toal, Kan turned it into an online service, the CD Database, or CDDB. The software to use CDDB, as well as the site itself, were also Free Software, again licensed under the GPL. Even the database itself was GPL licensed (although it’s a weird license to choose for data). The website was “free to all without charge” and funded by advertising, and lots of us nerds submitted album data to help each other when we used CD playing software or when we ripped CDs. As the site said:

>Use of the CDDB servers is FREE, so you can use the service as much as you like. The CDDB server software and database were created for the purpose of providing enjoyment to users of the Internet, and as everyone knows, the best things in life are free.

CDDB did doing well enough to earn positive mentions in Wired in 1997 and Macworld in 1998. It worked well, and we all lived happily ever after...

...in case you need to do a capitalism

In 1998, CDDB restructured and the trio sold it to consumer electronics company Escient. No worries, though, as the then owner of nerd news site Slashdot noted "Personally, I'd love to see more hardware integrate with things like the CDDB so I'm hoping for the best."

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal

In 1999, Escient really took over and things went downhill quickly. The previously server software was no longer available. You needed a license to use the site. But at least it was still free provided it was non-commericial use.

The now mandatory license is the real problem.

(As best I can tell, the full license was never placed online, only some quoted bits in articles like the above. You had to request access to get a copy.)

First, they want credit in your program. Maybe that's fair, you are using their service.

Second, you can't send the data elsewhere. The data was generously donated by users with the intent of sharing it freely. It was originally “freeware, and...distributed under the GNU General Public License”. Escient certainly has no valid copyright claim to the data (They’re not the original creators; that would be the musicians, and factual data cannot generally be copyrighted). Well, that data is now Escient's Precious and you're not allowed to take it elsewhere.

Third, you can't use the data to identify online services to connect to. So if you used CDDB to get song name information, you can't use that song name to link the user to a lyrics website. Erm, what?

And fourth:

>You agree to use the CDDB Database as the exclusive source for CD information whenever the access to such DATA is initiated by a process within your CD player application that reads CD TOC Data and retrieves Data via the Internet that is related to the CD.

If you use CDDB, you cannot offer users the choice of another service. The only reason to have such a clause is to stop competitors. They knew their new, draconian terms would lead to competitors springing up almost immediately, and they wanted to make it hard for competitors to get any traction.

For authors of Free Software CD playing and ripping programs and anyone using those applications, this was a serious problem. Nerds of these sorts (including me) were enraged! Many felt Gracenote had stolen their work and betrayed implicit promises about what it meant for the service to be “free” or the spirit of the original GPL. It’s arguably literally incompatible with the GPL, because anyone you ship GPL licensed software to is free to mess with it however they like, including violating Gracenote’s license that the user never agreed to. Promises to abandon CDDB and create replacements were made and... happened.

In 1999 CD Index, sprang up and disappeared quickly enough that I had entirely forgotten about it. Less than a month later we got FreeCDDB, which I believe quickly became FreeDB which would become the dominant replacement. In 2000, MusicBrainz would appear, but it’s slightly different, isn’t CDDB compatible, so we’ll talk about it when it reenters our story later.

So, at least we had FreeDB, and it quickly became well populated with music information and we moved on. and CDDB (now Gracenote) sucked it up and accepted the competition and we all lived hap— wait? Seriously?

In 2000, Gracenote claimed patents on their obvious technology and tried to use them to bully people into avoiding FreeDB, issuing threats and lawsuits. As FreeDB continued to exist and lots of software used it, it didn’t seem to matter, but Gracenote tried.

In 2001, Gracenote blocked access by programs that didn't agree to the license. More importantly, they denied new programs access to the original CDDB protocol. New applicants had to use a newer, incompatible protocol, possibly in part to make interoperability with FreeDB harder. And the newer protocol definitely required a commercial license for large scale use.

In 2006, Scherf would do an interview and tried to update Gracenote’s Wikipedia article to spin things in a positive light. It was much too late and certainly didn’t endear nerds to them.

FreeDB, MusicBrainz, and GnuDB save the day!

Well, on the up side, we got FreeDB, which quickly became a suitable replacement for CDDB and we all lived— what, again? sigh.

In 2006 FreeDB shut down due to developer disagreements. (This seems to collect some of the posts of people involved) Soon after, software company Magix purchased FreeDB and brought it back. And Magix kept it running! However in 2018, they were acquired by a private equity firm, which is not a phrase that ever bodes well. And for whatever reason, in 2020 it was shut down. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of formal announcement, just that little “Urgent notice freedb.org and its services will be shut down on March 31st of 2020.”

Well, remember MusicBrainz, another CDDB competitor that sprang up in 2000? By now they've formed a not-for-profit-organization, are dedicated to keeping the data under open licenses, and have more powerful tools! In response to Magix's purchase, they released a CDDB compatible interface to their system in 2007! And shut it down in 2019. https://blog.metabrainz.org/2018/09/18/freedb-gateway-end-of-life-notice-march-18-2019/ To be fair, they only envisioned their CDDB interface being for backward compatibility, and encourage using their newer, more powerful API. 12 years seems reasonably generous to provide backward compatible support for someone else’s product.

Finally, René Mogensen started GnuDb in 2006 to ensure FreeDB's data remained free and... it's still up? Good for Mogensen! But... I don’t use it. And that foreshadows the real end of the story.

The CD is dead, long live the music

These days, there is far less demand for a CDDB-like service, especially one using the original, very limited CDDB interface. You can easily buy music for download. Even if you’re a crank who demands DRM-free music (I’m one), there are multiple options. And I'll admit the allure of streaming nearly any song I want whenever I want was too much, so I pay for a streaming service and don't buy music any more. For all of these things you get high quality metadata provided by the publisher automatically. So maybe it's time to pay our respects to the original CDDB interface and move on.

For people who still need the information, or want even more, MusicBrainz appears to be healthy and more generally useful. It can identify tracks on a CD, but it can do much more. It’s a nuisance to update software to use the MusicBrainz’s interface, but it’s doable.

As for Gracenote? They've been sold repeatedly, but are apparently still around. I have no idea exactly what they sell, but they’re providing some sort of database for Toyota cars. The only thing I do know is that it’s not for identifying CDs.

Like most new cars, the Camry doesn’t have a CD player.