[UNDER DEVELOPMENT] A Replacement for Gracenote CDDB support

[Rahzil]

I have been typing in tracks for 3 years now and make my ripping much slower now. Any progress for a replacement for Gracenotes in the near future?


[edit - dro]
Title of thread tweaked to reflect the changing development status of this request

[stroke]

Hi, have you tried www.mp3tag.de/ ?  I'm using it since Gracenote stopped working in Winamp.

[dro]

I have been typing in tracks for 3 years now and make my ripping much slower now. Any progress for a replacement for Gracenotes in the near future?

I'm somewhat torn when it comes to this as currently I don't have a CD/DVD drive connected to my development machine. That happened when I moved to Win10 & came down to whether I disconnect it or keep my prior Win7 SSD connected (which I went with). Unless I can work out why the 7th & 8th SATA ports on the motherboard won't work with the SATA DVD I've got (as the other 6 SATA ports have SSDs & HDDs connected to them which I need). I guess I could just swap out the Win7 / DVD drive as needed but that's a hassle due to the nature of the 2008 era PC case I'm using

However I've been aware ever since the Gracenote access ended in May 2014 that there is still some demand for a working CD info look-up option within Winamp when it's used to rip though I don't know now whether there's enough demand for such support to be re-implemented. As anything I can do wouldn't be able to use Gracenote (they only want to deal with those who can pay to use them it seems and as donations since starting WACUP have maybe just covered site hosting costs, Gracenote is a no go option).

I had looked at using Musicbrainz before being taken off Winamp whilst with the company that shall not be named but I cannot find my notes on that at the moment as to whether it could still be a good option. As I'm not sure if

Anyway, the tl;dr answer is if there's enough demand (& incentives) then I can be open to looking into working on a replacement to re-enable the support within WACUP based installs. As I'd also have to look into replacing the existing in_cdda.dll plug-in so that CD-Text could be accessed along with removing one of the main reasons for having the old Sonic engine installed.

Hi, have you tried www.mp3tag.de/ ?  I'm using it since Gracenote stopped working in Winamp.

I know mp3tag can do certain lookups but I thought it can only work on files that have already been created and not at the pre-created stage. Without a connected CD / DVD drive it's likely I'm missing something (not that I found it much of a hassle to edit the tags in Winamp at the time as I generally found the Gracenote information to not be 100% correct vs the CD's info cards).

-dro

[Juanus]

If I could add my two cents...
Even if musicbrainz could be enabled for tracks already ripped, that would be cool.
I know that you don't have a CD drive connected anymore (and I think that most people might not anymore) BUT if you enabled the autotag button to do musicbrainz lookups, that would be a start and then someday when you get a CD Drive you could incorporate that?
For the future that is.

[dro]

BUT if you enabled the autotag button to do musicbrainz lookups, that would be a start

For that we basically need a consistent metadata handling implementation which allows for reading / writing musicbrainz ids (that's not the current case with the native input plug-ins). It'd also (for what I've thought about it so far) need work done on the local library handling so it can cope with musicbrainz ids and anything else that might be needed. So for that I've got some ideas already as it always seemed like something that more would benefit from.

-dro

[Juanus]

Like I said, it is definitely something to look at in the future.
Sure there are better CD rippers out there and there are better metadata taggers out there. Having it all in one place makes it nifty.
With what you mentioned with the consistent metadata handling implementation for all the plugins...  this sounds like its a bigger task than it seems.

[MarkRH]

I use CDex a lot and it uses freedb.org for album lookups when ripping.  Another option.

[dro]

Like I said, it is definitely something to look at in the future.
Sure there are better CD rippers out there and there are better metadata taggers out there. Having it all in one place makes it nifty.

That seemed to be one of the reasons why people liked it (and others despised it due to it bastardising their player).

With what you mentioned with the consistent metadata handling implementation for all the plugins...  this sounds like its a bigger task than it seems.

It probably is but I won't know until I do the proper research on what to use. As rolling my own tag libraries isn't worth the hassle but working with existing matured solutions is what I'd prefer to do (quicker & as long as I pick the right ones then should make it easier to maintain / tweak if needed and be stable).

I use CDex a lot and it uses freedb.org for album lookups when ripping.  Another option.

I vaguely remember looking into that but there was something about it that put me off for some reason. But yes it's another option if I were to do anything

-dro

[dro]

... as currently I don't have a CD/DVD drive connected to my development machine.

...

Unless I can work out why the 7th & 8th SATA ports on the motherboard won't work with the SATA DVD I've got (as the other 6 SATA ports have SSDs & HDDs connected to them which I need)

Either it was a bad cable (possible) or the machine is just being nice to me (it's probably fed up of me cursing it) but I've finally got a working DVD drive in the machine again. This makes it easier for me now if I decide to do something about this broken support.

-dro

[can ignore this as it's more for my record]
So somewhere between changing most of the SATA cables (I need to get a few more now) to ones that have locking connectors on them (one of the old cables I had was a bit loose on trying to diagnose the BSOD issues I've been having of late), replacing the last HDD I've got (needed to anyway as it's almost full) & moving most of the SSDs into a drive bay cage that fits into a 5.25" bay (makes it easier to access / move things around for me now) & resetting a number of options in the BIOS, the secondary drive controller finally recognised the DVD drive.

[Juanus]

That's awesome! I know that you have had many fights with your computer and it is good to see that you have finally won.

If you can recode/update the CD support to not use Sonic (and maybe update the support to be better than it was) That is a huge win for CD Playback. (Even though I can't think of the last time I played a CD) I am sure there are some examples out there.

Then onwards and upwards to metadata lookup support. I vote for MusicBrainz,

[dro]

Time will tell if the random BSODs go away with these hardware changes or not (as it can range from twice in a day to 3-4 days until it happens).

As for CD support, I've got my notes still somewhere for what I'd used in the version that I'd worked on post-sale. It worked ok for what I could test against with playback and ripping of CDs including supporting reading CD-Text without Sonic being enabled & I don't think it was speed limited (as it then depends on the OS more than the control that Sonic + pro licensing implied).

Though for certain things (mainly writing to CDs) then Sonic is still needed or is just easier / better to use a dedicated burner instead. But I'd assume (bad thing to do, heh) that playback / ripping were the more commonly used options compared to burning of CDs (especially as it couldn't do MP3 CDs).

-dro

[dro]

I'll cover it a bit more in the blog post that I need to finish off but from my Sunday night "fun time" I've managed to get the basis of a replacement CD playback plug-in working as I was able to find a copy of the example code that I'd used to test out using the Windows DAE (Digital Audio Extraction) support before refining it for the company that shall not be named.

The end result is a very basic replacement plug-in that does just enough to play a CD for me without the need for the Sonic engine. The native CD playback plug-in also doesn't work for me unless Sonic is present which I assume is due to something about Windows 10 &/or how the native plug-in does fallback to other methods (which unless DAE fails for a number of people, I don't plan on trying to re-create).

-dro

[Juanus]

Goodbye Sonic!

[dro]

It should remove the need for it with playback and ripping, just not with the existing burning support.

-dro

[Juanus]

If you completely removed burning support I don't think anyone would complain. I know I wouldn't. And I would rather have less "bloat"  and drivers to install.