data-design question

Alex Tweedly alex at tweedly.net
Mon Sep 26 08:23:15 EDT 2005


david bovill wrote:

> On 26 Sep 2005, at 03:11, Alex Tweedly wrote:
>
>> It would be interesting to have a future version where the data  
>> could be collected as a collaborative effort (like CDDB/freedb  
>> were); although the number of people who want this data may be  
>> relatively small, I wouldn't be surprised if a good portion of them  
>> were sufficiently enthusiasts that you could get some benefit from  
>> making it available..... something to think about after the basic  
>> version is working well.
>
>
> Which makes me think - what is the harm of just using CDDB/freedb as  
> a backend - does the database not have fields for who performed on  
> which track?
>
CDDB is no longer freely licensed. If there's a DB spec available, I 
can't find it (though given the history,  I assume it's very similar to 
freedb). And the on-line search doesn't do any track info searching 
(except track name).

freedb doesn't have suitable fields.
It has the EXTTn - extended data for track 'n' - which is described as 
"intended to be used for other data about the track", but there is no 
convention on how that could be used, and no way to search on it 
effectively. It's possible (though unlikely) that the local version 
would have more options - but I'm not going to do a 400Mb download just 
to try it out :-)
(estimated time to complete .....  2 weeks 3 days and a fews hours. I 
*am* looking forward to getting broadband ...)

Also, I noticed that the downloads include a variety of programs to 
convert the flat-file formats used by freedb into MySQL or Jet or .... 
formats - so I think that for your own use you'd want to be using a 
relational DB anyway.

I do still think that import / export to freedb, including adding the 
track/musician/instrument data into the EXTTn fields, would  be worth 
including - but I don't think it should just use cddb/freedb

-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net



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