There's mention of other mp3 players that have the CDDB built in. Is there a way for me to download this to my laptop too? This weekend, I'm going up to the mountains for a couple of days with a bunch of friends and I'm bringing my laptop. Let's just say for testing purposes, I'm assuming a lot of my friends might bring some of their own CDs that I may want to rip to mp3, and was wondering if I can rip those CDs and have MusicMatch point to an internal database on my laptop w/o being online. Can this be done?

Once upon a time, one could download the CDDB, but I think since Gracenote took it over, you now have to license it from them to get a hard copy.

And then you're dependent on whether or not your ripping software will work with a local copy. The ripper would have to suport it that way, and I'm guessing most of them don't.

Personally, I'd just not worry about it and take the extra two minutes to type in the track titles. Seems to me that the total time you spend ripping and tagging while you're away from the internet would be less than the amount of hassle-time it would take getting a local copy of the CDDB working.

If you're using MusicMatch, it's got a feature called Deferred CDDB. You can make sure it's enabled under Options/Settings..., then select the CDDB Connectivity tab. There should be a checkbox called "Deferred CDDB".

When you go to rip CDs, if the jukebox can't detect an internet connection (or you tell it you're offline), it'll store the TOC of the CD. Next time you connect to the internet, it'll prompt you to look up the CDDB information for those CDs you ripped. As long as you haven't renamed or moved the files, it should be fine.

I think we enabled Deferred lookup in 7.0. The new 7.1 version (just out today) has it called CD Lookup.

ahh, perfect. i'll give it a try this weekend.

thanks

svferris: I just checked your tag, and noticed you worked for Music Match. Sounds like fun. I like using music match because it's very easy, but one thing I don't use in mmjb is the VBR setting because the % doesn't make sense to me. If they would label it different somehow, like quality wise, or compare it to another bit rate, it would look more appealing to me. Maybe it's just me, but the setting it shows always makes me avoid using it.

I'm surprised no one mentioned FreeDB
\
http://www.freedb.org/

that works with EAC but not MusicMatch
it also works with Notify CD Player to just play music

He asked for a way to download CDDB... which FreeDB is a quasi mirror of, and that's where to do it. =]

I know, I was just letting him know that he can't use it with MusicMatch, but he can with EAC. I wasn't trying to say you were wrong. Just thought I'd let him know before he tried to get it to work with something it never would work with...

Well, that's not what i was trying to say, stay out of my business! *sniff sniff*

hehe... j/k. =]

sorry, i have no idea why i even responded in the first place. Didn't mean to come off snippy.

I think you are just trying to boost your post count...
don't be ashamed, everyone does it...

Yeah, I love working here at MusicMatch. We're really a great bunch of people trying to design the best jukebox for the music fan. (Bet that sounded like a marketing line, huh?)

I agree with you on the VBR setting. I had no idea what 1% was versus 100%. This, on top of the fact that empeg doesn't support the Fraunhofer VBR tags properly, led me to use EAC and LAME to do my VBR encoding.

Oh, and it's not the fault of empeg on the tag thing. Fraunhofer won't release the specs on their VBR headers. I actually asked the head of our programming team if we would ever consider letting people specify an outside encoder and he said possibly. It's definitely not on the slate right now, but maybe a little while down the road?

That would be awesome...
I enjoy the ease of use in MusicMatch and have used it for a while...
I bought it back in the day when you had to purchase it to get anything better then 96kbps...
since recently getting my Empeg I have starting using EAC because I can hear a difference with the empeg hooked up to my Home Stereo that I didn't hear as obvious with my sound card hooked up to it.
Going external would be nice...

Going external would be nice...

Yeah, I just don't know what kind of contractual obligations we have with Fraunhofer. We work pretty close with them.

I also wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of hard-coded stuff when it comes to the Fraunhofer encoder. It would probably take quite a bit of effort to detach the encoder from the software.

it is a nicely written program though...
definitely helped me when I was first getting into MP3...

hmmm...should go check out that 7.1...

FYI, 7.1 is pretty much just bug fixes. The one major change/improvement was that we dropped CDDB in favor of our own CD Lookup service that we developed internally. I think the content may lack behind CDDB for a few months, but with the number of users we have, I imagine we'll easily surpass the amount of data CDDB has in no time.

Currently, the service recognizes somewhere around 90-95% percent of popular CDs. I think it drops off to somewhere around 80% for lesser known CDs. I'd recommend giving it a try. I think it's better than CDDB.

does it do Year and have better Genre than it did?
funny you mentioned this...
I looked at the about screen before and after the upgrade and did notice that CDDB logo was removed...
wasn't Gracenote suing companies that dropped there support, like Roxio did?

And Kudos on the deffered CDDB lookup. It was a godsend on my notebook - it is not always plugged into a modem or LAN. MM is still my favorite tag editor (even though I HATE all the default settings like "always use id3v1" and "always reclaim file types") even if I don't use it for ripping. Certainly the best way to get into mp3. The learning curve on EAC and others is too high.

Hmm, I just tested the lookup and it didn't grab the year. I could have sworn we were implementing that, though. I'll have to ask the programmer working on this. As for Genre, I think we're using the basic genres that are used by AMG. There's like 15 or 20 of them, I believe. I was somewhat disappointed by this, but your average user probably doesn't know all the niche sub-genres. Let me know what you think of it.

I can't talk too much about the CDDB situation. Let's just say we were happy to develop our own. Who knows what Gracenote will think of it. Not sure we told them. I guess they'll find out soon enough.

Do you set the "Always use ID3v2 tags" radio button in the settings menu, and it reverts back? Let me know and I'll submit that as a bug.

Also, does the same go for the "Always reclaim" button? That is, do you set it to "Ask" or "Never reclaim", and it reverts back? If so, I'll put that one in as a bug too.

I just leave MM as my main media player. If I ever want to use something else, I just open the program and drag things into it. The only thing that bothers me is that I can't seem to get MM to NOT autoplay CDs. That one bugs me to no end.

I agree with you on the VBR setting. I had no idea what 1% was versus 100%

Can you expalin what the % means? Or is it still a mystery to everyone except the programmer? And if it's in the current documentation, I apologize, haven't read it since I bought version 3.0

Heh, you guys will get a kick out of this...

I asked the programmer who works on VBR what it meant and his response was: "I don't know...I think somebody explained it to me once, but I don't remember".

This is another case where the Fraunhofer encoder is basically a black box, and we just send encoding requests to it, not really knowing how it does it. This is why I couldn't get any info for Rob on what the Fraunhofer VBR headers look like.

FYI, here's what our help files say:
"Choose a VBR setting from 1 to 100, low end being the lowest quality/highest compression and high end being the highest quality/lowest compression, to customize your recording."

I asked the programmer who works on VBR what it meant and his response was: "I don't know...I think somebody explained it to me once, but I don't remember".

Yikes! Well I've tried the EAC/LAME method for VBR and I'm happy with it, but I use MMJB for playing files and editing tags. I used to use MMJB exclusively until I got a new CD burner. CDR trades of Clapton shows anyone?

Yeah, MusicMatch/Fraunhofer does a pretty good job with CBR files, but when it comes to VBR files, it doesn't cut it. It's not a high priority because the average user doesn't understand VBR enough to use it anyways.

I've been using EAC/LAME to do all my ripping (with alt preset standard VBR) and love it. It does a really good job. Slower than MMJB, but much more accurate and error-free.

Once I'm done with my ripping, though, i'll definitely be going back to MMJB to fix all the tags.

This is taking the off-topic conversation further off-topic, I suppose, sorry...

Scott, with you working at MusicMatch, can you tell me what the logistics involved are when it comes to streaming a customised radio station? Must be pretty involving on hardware...

I've only just discovered cutomised radio on MM and think it's really awesome (but will only start to use it properly once I have ADSL instead of ISDN); always thought of Internet radio as a bit of a gimmick for music but this is brilliant.

Hmmm, now about that Rio Receiver...

I'll try to give you the quick rundown of the setup (as I'm familiar with it).

Basically, we have a very large storage of MP3s here at the office. They are all ripped at 192kbps. Once a CD is ripped, it is then transcoded down to the different bitrates of our streams. Every week this is sent to our network partner (was Akamai, now Limelight). This is cached on machines all over the world.

When a user makes a request for a radio station, it contacts our servers and we return a setlist. Then, the jukebox makes a request for the first song. This request is redirected to the closest server that has that song cached. If it's not cached, then the local server will contact our main content server and retrieve the data.

As for how the data is served, I'm not too sure on the method. From what I've heard, we server up the most significant bits first, followed by the least significant bits. Don't know if that makes sense, but I think that's how it works. We also cache bits locally on the machine. You can increase, decrease, or turn this off from the settings menu.

When it comes to personalization, we use our recommendation info (based on anonymous user play data) to relate artists together. If we see a pattern of Pearl Jam listeners liking Stone Temple Pilots, we'll relate the two.

The system is quite a bit more complicated than that, but that is a quick overview.

Impressive, thanks

I thought I would mention that I was able to rip all of my friends CDs last weekend and when I brought my laptop back to work and plugged in the ethernet, music match automatically renamed all the files and id tags. It worked great.

I'm glad to hear it worked well. I'd hate to have you come back and it not work right.