CDDB problems (Gracenote Services No Longer Work In Winamp: Reason Why Explained)

[Archguy]

Okay, it's mid-July

Any word on progress? And those of us who paid up for Winamp Pro, was that money wasted?

[DJ-Garybaldy]

And those of us who paid up for Winamp Pro, was that money wasted?

Most probably!!

[ugoveri]

A very customizable file tagger for winamp.

For me there is nothing better for Windows than Tag & Rename (http://www.softpointer.com/index.htm)

It has multiple ways of inputing information. And multiple ways of reading the information from the filename or from several servers on the internet.

So if you want a powerfull tagger I believe this is it.

Best regards,

Hugo Verissimo

[SireMarvin]

Well this is great news.

I have been a Musicbrainz fan for years and the winamp forum has barely mentioned it apart from the last month or so. With all the "winamp should die as you don't provide gracetone" posts.

It is a much better system for tagging your music collection.

DrO,

I have spent a lot of time with Musicbrainz and know a fair few inner workings of it.
Finally if you do have proper tags multiple artists sharing the same name can be grouped together properly rather than all lumped under the same name.

I think you will need to decide what MB tags move across. I would suggest as many of them:
MusicBrainz Artist Id
MusicBrainz Recording Id
MusicBrainz Release Artist Id
MusicBrainz Release Group Id
MusicBrainz Release Id
MusicBrainz Track Id

That will give you the best compatibility in the future.
To be honest properly tagged with musicbrainz can led to whole new directions of how you want your player as you can link to a load of stuff.

Can I ask how you are planning to lookup this information?
Your own database (free) copy of Musicbrainz on Winamp servers or using their (paid or free) API? Their free API has lookup limits and I suspect that we could (depending on how many users are left using Winamp) hit those limits. I have not dealt with the licensing to their paid API directly but I do know someone that has.

For the cover art (The Cover Art Achieve). That is a recent addition to Musicbrainz in conjunction with archive.org. So there is a fair amount to of art missing still but going fairly rapidly.
I suppose you need to work out what level of granularity you need to go down to here. Is a generic cover art for that Release Group ok or do you want it for that actual Release (UK original release from 1999, re-release in Japan 2012, etc). AFAIK lastfm is very generic and will just get (some sort of art).

Musicbrainz goes into so much detail (often why people struggle with Picard) you will need to decide what you want to get out of it. I cannot imagine it will be much fun to select many versions of the release.

Users obviously want (as in any development) a magic button that does everything for them Previously this was Auto-Tag. But when you get options you need to decide what one (or ones) you give the user.

Personally I would be against multiple options for providers but obviously biased. But if you do implement this can have options to turn this off/choose which ones.

[MrSinatra]

i don't think DrO is working on winamp anymore. maybe that will change, but seems to be the case for now. who knows if the new devs read the forums or care or even if they r developing a new release at all?

having said that, i'll just repeat what i said before: let winamp fully support all aspects of MB, but allow users to decide what MB tags to include or not to include.

[chapiz]

Most probably!!

You should talk to the support

[amymaarten]

The last several days my Winamp is playing songs in fastforward...any known fixes?

[OrajelJunkie]

It's been years since winamp could tag files and people are still using it?I only still use it for listening and puting music on my ipod.It's a shame they dropped gracenote and now refuse to do anything.Winamp went from the greatest invention ever to a big pile of poop.It's still better than itunes though.

[sahartech]

whatever the system used, it's only as good as the information which people put into it and personally i found Gracenote's CDDB lookups very hit and miss (or just people don't care about getting things correct compared to the actual titling on the CD case itself!).

[MrSinatra]

love it or hate it, Gracenote is moot, its dead to us b/c of the cost and exclusivity.

as i said above, i hope winamp uses an EAC style plugin system where multiple sources could be used, be it freedb, cuetoolsDB, MB, or whatever. i would also like control of what individual tags are actually inserted, (MB can spam tags in).

[Lion_King]

Well still have version 5.33 and Gracenote work fine for me till today.
But and the Εvil Lyrics plug-in use FDDB and work fine.
As I see it I will not update anytime soon.
For me remain the best music player ever.Even use two instances to mix-up songs.

[sahartech]

I saw this too yesterday. Does anyone have another method/software that does the same thing? With iTunes for example when trying to update the file info it says that I have to import the songs with iTunes in order to do that (I guess from the original CD or something...?). So it can't be done when dragging a song into the file library.

[Charsiupao]

What I do these days is I insert the CD, Open WinAmp and edit CD info, then go to Windows Media Player which (surprisingly) has a very good and accurate database even for the Japanese CDs I have. I then cut and paste the CD and track data one by one to WinAmp, then rip the CD once it's done.

It's extremely tedious, but I spend far more time listening to music than ripping CDs, and so I find the process bearable. There simply isn't a player I like as much as WinAmp.

I'm not sure if WMP can actually do the ripping for me, and then I just add the tracks via WinAmp. Has anyone tried that?

[Aminifu]

...

I'm not sure if WMP can actually do the ripping for me, and then I just add the tracks via WinAmp. Has anyone tried that?

Yes, WMP can rip. I prefer to use EAC. Among other things, it lets me easily add more encoders for converting to various formats after the initial rip.

[MrSinatra]

WMP uses allmusic.com, aka Rovi. i used to use WMP to add missing tags, but it handles art poorly and i eventually just stopped using it. WMP will rip CDs, and i never liked ripping a CD with winamp. at this point tho, i stay pretty far away from WMP.

try dbpoweramp or EAC.