Hi Jonathan, it's been interesting reading all the replies to your original question. In fact, I found this site with a google search for "gracenote cddb database", and this site was second on the list!
My experience with using a CDDB service started out with MusicMatch a few years ago, then Windows Media Player (I know, I know, a temporary lapse of sanity, I assure you), and now I have settled on WinAmp. The first 2 players also accessed public CDDB's, and I remember finding that there were many errors in the titles, as well as many inconsistencies, like some with all words using uppercase, some with normal sentence case, and worse still, some with all lower case.
Since moving to WinAmp, which is hardcoded to use Gracenote, I have found a few errors, but to be honest (and potentially controversial!), far less than the other CDDB's.
Having said that, I popped in a CD for which there were no CDDB entries, so WinAmp allows the upload of information that I type in to be written back to the Gracenote CDDB. Alas, I made some serious mistakes, which I only found out after I played the ripped files. However, like mentioned a few times above, once the information has been sent to the Gracenote's database, there was no way for me to go back and correct it.
In their defence however, if they did allow that, how would they control, or quality check this activity? There are real slimebuckets out there that would delight in wrecking something that works well (albeit most times). It is often the few that spoil it for the majority, that's just life.
Bottom line is that for me, the service is free, and it saves me a heap of keystrokes and time, so I can put up with a few errors here and there?
...would be nice to be able to right my wrong though. I feel a bit stink about it actually.
Sean
Hi Jonathan, it's been interesting reading all the replies to your original question. In fact, I found this site with a google search for "gracenote cddb database", and this site was second on the list!
My experience with using a CDDB service started out with MusicMatch a few years ago, then Windows Media Player (I know, I know, a temporary lapse of sanity, I assure you), and now I have settled on WinAmp. The first 2 players also accessed public CDDB's, and I remember finding that there were many errors in the titles, as well as many inconsistencies, like some with all words using uppercase, some with normal sentence case, and worse still, some with all lower case.
Since moving to WinAmp, which is hardcoded to use Gracenote, I have found a few errors, but to be honest (and potentially controversial!), far less than the other CDDB's.
Having said that, I popped in a CD for which there were no CDDB entries, so WinAmp allows the upload of information that I type in to be written back to the Gracenote CDDB. Alas, I made some serious mistakes, which I only found out after I played the ripped files. However, like mentioned a few times above, once the information has been sent to the Gracenote's database, there was no way for me to go back and correct it.
In their defence however, if they did allow that, how would they control, or quality check this activity? There are real slimebuckets out there that would delight in wrecking something that works well (albeit most times). It is often the few that spoil it for the majority, that's just life.
Bottom line is that for me, the service is free, and it saves me a heap of keystrokes and time, so I can put up with a few errors here and there?
...would be nice to be able to right my wrong though. I feel a bit stink about it actually.
Cheers, Sean