Hi,
Does anyone have any experience of Freedb and Musicbrainz?
Which one do people prefer? Which has the best coverage? Which is the most accurate?
I live in the UK and buy most of my CDs here. My music is mainly rock/pop/folk/indie and I do have a small number of classical CDs (mainly opera).
Thanks,
MusicBrainz's database is much, much better than FreeDB's. You can even access it from a FreeDB-enabled application, using MusicBrainz's gateway (http://musicbrainz.org/doc/FreeDBGateway).
Musicbrainz is the only cd database I know that follows proper capitalization (http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Capitalization_Standard_English).
I use both sevices , when I can't find an album in one, I search in an other.
This is with the software mp3tag.
With EAC, I just use freedb.
Which is the most accurate?
Hard to tell, as every user entry are probably not checked one by one.
One I got a double CD, and realized that the titles for CD1 where inverted
with titles of CD2, at MusicBrainz.
Notice that last Sound Forge version , use neither of these services, but a commercial equivalent "gracenote".
In my experience, MusicBrainz entries tend to be more thorough than those of FreeDB. However, FreeDB's coverage is much wider. So I query MusicBrainz first and, if there's no match, try FreeDB next.
I use MusicBrainz because it is better dan Freeddb.
If you are a music-lover: use MusicBrainz and participate active.
MusicBrainz voting (previously called moderation) system is designed to give MusicBrainz users the power to update and maintain the Database. Maintaining a comprehensive database for popular music is a large task, and MusicBrainz will depend on its users to spot mistakes in the database and then to take the initiative to correct these errors.
Quoting MusicBrainz FAQ:
Why would I need to use your site? What's wrong with FreeDB?
"FreeDB is based on the last version of CDDB that was freely available. While it is a very useful site, it is technically inferior to this site as it is based on a flat format. i.e. releases are not grouped by artists, they just have a text field "Artist Name". Different printings of the same release that are not quite identical go into the listing twice etc. There is no concept of a single track being on more than one release -- a track doesn't really exist in its own right. While MusicBrainz is not perfect in this respect, it is a lot better, and plans for improvements are laid down. The path to achieving those goals is clear. It would be very hard to give FreeDB those facilities. Eventually it is envisioned by some that MusicBrainz could take over from FreeDB, although they may evolve to take different markets, or be competitors continually spurring each other on.
In certain places, MusicBrainz itself uses FreeDB when it doesn't know a release already."
I have not used it myself, but I understand that dBpoweramp gets results from three different databases and combines the best information from all three.
I much prefer MusicBrainz, but I find it's still not very friendly towards the doujin music scene, where albums are released under a single circle (or group) for publishing purposes, but individual tracks are credited to the specific performers.
I personally use discogs (http://www.discogs.com/) instead of Musicbrainz. freedb is my fallback database as it covers almost every release; in every case I perform a "manual" (using foobar2000 standard properties dialog, pretty much can be achieved) clean-up of the data.
I like Music Brainz. You can get an account and fix errors in the database when you find them. This is nice because if you ever rip the same disc again, the info will be correct next time.
dBpoweramp's "PerfectMeta" system is probably the best compromise. I haven't had a disc yet that wasn't in at least one of the 4 databases it uses.