FreeDB
- From: <jaffar@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:55:26 +0800
Hi All. If like me, you are a music fanatic, have a vast music collection
which ranges from classical to Jazz to Pop to Rock and would like to have them
organized and propperly tagged so you can find them whenever you want them,
then I'd like to recommend a free, open source, programmable music database
called FreeDb www.freedb.org
If you visit it's download page, You'll find the following:
1. complete database files which are updated from month to month.
2. Update files which when you download accompanying utilities, and together
with the update files wich are smaller in comparison, will update your database
so you don't have to download the complete files which are rather large,
upwards of 500 MB every month.
3. An accompanying howto that will help you to develop stand alone FreeDB
related software, for example software that will update, submit or mirror your
database in a network.
4. A server that will allow you to submit and retrieve database updates as and
when you like. However, the server software requires some technical know how
to build and configure as it is not a straight forward gui software.
The files are in the unix format by default, but you could change them to the
windows format via a utility called mkfreedb.exe. If anyone wants to host this
utility on their server, let me know and i will send it along as the website
for this utility is rather obscure and I came across it only after a thorough
search of google.
Here is a synopsis of the steps you'll need to take to download the database
and the utilities described.
1. Go to www.freedb.org and click the download page. By default, you'll land
on the server download page. Click parent directory. Unfortunately, this
directory has no headings to mark where each subsection exactly is, so use your
tab and arrow keys to find what you need.
If you want to download the complete database, then you'll need to look for
files with words "freedb-complete" followed by the year month day date format.
so, for example, if you want to download the complete database for october,
then you should look for the file tagged as:
freedb-complete-20081001.tar.bz2, which translates to year 2008, month october,
and date as the first of that month.
If you downloaded the complete database for september for example, and you want
to update your database to october's, just download the:
freedb-update-20081001.tar.bz2 which is consideraably smaller, about 7 mb in
size.
Once you have those, download a zip file called freedb-updater.zip which
contains a freedb.exe updater file. All you need do then is to unpack the
complete september database files into a directory, say music-database. Then
double click the updater.exe and browse to your music-database folder, then
browse again to your updater file, freedb-update-20081001.tar.bz2, then tab to
the start button and your september database will be updated to the current
one. Btw, be prepared to give your database folder at least 4 gb of disk space.
Now, if you wanted to change the format of your database files from the unix
format to the windows format, just do the following.
1. create a folder. We'll call it music-windows-database for clarification.
2. copy and paste the complete database file, and the mkfreedb.exe which i will
send along to any one who wants it to your music-windows-database folder.
3. open your command prompt and cd to your music-windows-database directory, so
assuming your directory is on your C drive, the command is:
cd c:\music-windows-database
Now, all you have to do is to issue the command
mkfreebd, and your windows database will be built with all its default
structure, and the database files copied to the appropriate subdirectories.
Your music-windows-directory will then contain the following subdirectories and
a log text file.
1. blues where all the blues music data files will be copied.
2. Classical where all the classical music data files will be copied.
3. country where all the country music data files will be copied
4. data, where all the data files necessary for the database to function will
be copied
5. folk where all the folk music data files will be copied
6. jazz, where all the jazz music data files will be copied
7. misc where all the miscellanious music data files will be copied.
8. newage where all new age music data files will be copied.
9. reggae where all reggae music data files will be copied.
10. rock where all rock and pop music data files will be copied.
11. soundtrack where all film soundtrack music data files will be copied.
12. a log file will be created to tell you how the build process transpired
Warning: please note that the conversion of files from unix to windows format
takes hours. I did my conversion yesterday evening my time, and the conversion
process is still going on as i write this email. This is hardly surprising as
there are millions of cds floating around in the music market out there.
Once you have organized your database, You can then use programs such as mp3 tag
www.mp3tag.de to tag and organize your music. You can even store the music
data in the recognized dbms like mysql, microsoft access or any dbms of your
choice.
first create the following tables.
1. artist
2. title
3. album
4. year
5. publisher
6 track number.
Give the files in your database the sql extension, then load them as a dump
into mysql or the dbms of your choice.
If you need any more clarification, please let me know. Cheers and happy
tagging.
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