#musicbrainz

some linux programs don't read CDs right either

Hey, nikki! How many GB do you have left of your music collection?

hey nikki, good morning

good middle of the night :P

BGreeNZ: of the unsorted shit or in total?

Dunno. Both?

9.3 gigs and too much

wuff

mjau?

nikki: is there a russian artist name capitalization standard? or should the regular russian capitalization standard be used? cause it's not being used for all artist names right now

I would say that it should be covered by the capitalisation standard for russian...

and no rule as well ;)

it makes sense to use language rules unless there's artist intent...

how do you figure out the intent of the artist if they never use the guideline capitalization standard when they refer to themselves

?

if they always use the same thing, that's probably how they want it

if they keep changing, they're obviously not very bothered about the capitalisation...

inhouseuk: If I ever managed to write a freedb to MB proxy, would FreePascal be OK?

BGreeNZ: you mean a simple freedb lookup integrated in mb?

nikki: i wonder how powerdul of an argument that is considering for instance, http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/??????_???????_(??...

I see lots of question marks...

I mean, a freedb-protocol proxy for accessing MB, so that everybody's favourite CD ripper can use it

that was no utf-8 ;)

BGreeNZ: should be easy as you can search by freedb id in MB

nikki: sorry about that http://tinyurl.com/9bkxf

BGreeNZ: people have thought about doing that before, but I think it would only be done if it were hosted somewhere else, it would be a lot of load on mb servers for little profit...

:)

How about a proxy server that runs on localhost? Can that be done?

everything is possible ;)

Is it currently possible for a client app to take a freedb ID and either convert it into a bunch of MB discIDs, or hand it to the server to search?

you can already hand it to the server for a search

Surely, then, that means we're half way there?

the difficulty comes with squeezing the wonderful MB data into the freedb protocol without loosing anything useful - like track artists

is it just me or the wikipedia link i added here http://musicbrainz.org/artist/1b67ca7b-3da9-460... looks strange?

it'll work properly, it's just truncated on display

How is that difficult? freedb uses "space-slash-space" as a standard separator (unfortunately, it seems it's only guaranteed to work on VA albums, so albumartists would be lost)

that's one of my wifes favourite groups

freedb has no such standardization

it's completely up to the submitting client

inhouseuk: they are legendary. i'd be surprised if she didn't like them

flamingcow: I beg to differ. From freedb.howto.txt:

DTITLE: Technically, this may consist of any data, but by convention contains

the artist and disc title (in that order) separated by a "/" with a

single space on either side to separate it from the text. There may be

other "/" characters in the DTITLE, but not with space on both sides,

as that character sequence is exclusively reserved as delimiter of

artist and disc title! If the "/" is absent, it is implied that the

artist and disc title are the same, although in this case the name

should rather be specified twice, separated by the delimiter.

If the disc is a sampler containing titles of various artists, the disc

artist should be set to "Various" (without the quotes).

TTITLEN:There must be one of these for each track in the CD. The track

number should be substituted for the "N", starting with 0. This field

should contain the title of the Nth track on the CD. If the disc is a

sampler and there are different artists for the track titles, the

track artist and the track title (in that order) should be separated

by a "/" with a single space on either side to separate it from the text.

BGreeNZ: we know what it says, but how many freedb entries are actually correct

and how many clients impliment it correctly

"should" and "convention"

Every client I've tried can correctly import single artist *and* "Various" CDs

but what do they put in the artist tag on the mp3?

and can they deal with utf-8/unicode input

freedb supports utf8...

but do all the clients?

that's their problem if they don't

The problem seems to come when applying the TTITLEN standard to discs where the disc artist is not "Various"

All the clients I've seen correctly parse out the artist names, provided that either the track artists are "blank", or the disc artist is "Various"

Ewww! Gross!

Even when going back to before Gracenote took over CDDB

Ewww! Gross!

I'm logging. I don't understand 'Yes, I know Gracenote is gross! :)', BGreeNZ. Try /msg MBChatLogger help

awww, you've confused it now

poor thing :(

I hate the evil empire

Microsoft and Gracenote can both go to hell

obviously :)

lol

Point is, there *is* a standard for the format of freedb data. Whether any particular client follows that standard is beyond our control. It certainly won't be any worse than how they react to existing freedb data :)

inhouseuk: Do you have any other concerns about "squeezing" the wonderful MusicBrainz data into a freedb-format record? We can even provide info like year-of-release (DYEAR) and annotations (EXTD and EXTTN)

no, just that I wouldn't want to try it :)

Only thing we don't have is genre, but I still don't exacty understand what that is. (I think most freedb submissions wind up under misc or rock, don't they?)

bgreenz: your time would be much better spent adding musicbrainz support to your favorite utilities

than trying to cram useful data into a messy format

Two words: closed source

then don't use it

your freedom is important :)

I generally do try to avoid closed source apps now. If MB could be used as a drop-in replacement for freedb, though, perhaps more people would use it?

but that would be bad...

FWIW, I wasn't suggesting implementing the submission side of the protocol. That would be impossible

my comment earlier still stands...

as there are occasional load problems with the servers, we don't want to encourage even higher load

especially as we wouldn't be getting anything back

except high load, of course :)

I guess I can see your point there

I hate the evil empire

How do existing MB users rip and tag their CDs, then? Or, am I the only one here still stuck with Microsoft Windows?

thought, it should be noted, that we have 3 servers now. next week we'll have 7. :-)

that I would hope will make the site a little more snappy and resistant to load spikes.

however, just being a drop in replacement for freedb is still not a good idea

that is, if I can figure out which rails to buy for our hodgepodge of servers

So, the concern here is that, if existing apps could be used to lookup and tag with MB, we wouldn't get anything back?

yup

the idea is that when we do something, it should benefit the end users and the project.

something that puts nothing but load on our servers and gives the end users something is not maintable in the long

run

I agree there. However, the user would still have to find the MB project, and be interested enough to use it.

Then, if they care enough to use it, they will want to contribute to it.

ohhhh. is blümchen a little flower?

I think if the interface was implimented, the news would spread very quickly and freedb client users would just change the server name to point to it.

I doubt they would contribute very much in return

BTW, how is this any different from someone using the tagger (or Picard) to tag their music collection? What do we get back from that?

they have to interact with the server to do that

so they're more likely to fix mistakes

and it nags for a donation

nikki_: yes

A proxy could do the same thing, couldn't it?

bwa. it only occured to me just now, for some reason.

BGreeNZ: yes, we've talked about setting up proxies like that

but it comes back down to hosting costs -- who will bear them?

at the beginning of next year, it will cost us $1000/month to host MB.

thats a fair chunk of change that needs to be coughed up.

I suggested that such a proxy could run on localhost, rather than being hosted on the server

how would that work?

sure. but what is that proxy going to talk to?

I suppose I could do it, given I have a replicated server...

but most people?

if we're to make a livecd that boots, downloads the data and jacks itself into a replicated mirror network, maybe.

The proxy would talk to the MB servers, wouldn't it?

that would create too much load

yes, but who pays for that extra traffic?

What if a MB login were required to use it, just like the tagger?

safe no votes here http://musicbrainz.org/mod/search/pre/moderator...