[geeks] CD Database

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

I was prompted to ask this by a question on another mailing list, but
felt I would get a better response here. :-)

A long time ago, I downloaded the CDDB database (remember when it was free?)
and was appalled by the organization of the data. It was a bunch of flat files
with unparsed fields in them. 

At the time I had no real access to a database engine so I wrote some sloppy
Perl code to make one large byte indexed file out of it. I indexed it by
CD number, artist and album name. The individual parts records were converted 
into fields of one long record. The number of tracks was counted and made
part of the record, only those tracks which actually existed were in the
record.

The artist and album name were compressed to remove non important characters
and then converted to soundex keys. Soundex was popular in the 1970's
for indexing English words. It converted sounds (as pronounced in English)
to common groups. I did not use the full process so mouse, mouses,
mowse and maus all came out the same, but mice did not.

The code and the database were left at that job, 5 years ago. Not much loss,
the database has long since expanded and the code was not very good.

Based upon the question I saw today, I would like to know if there is an
SQL version of the FreeDB. The only thing I can find is a version from
the owners of the data which is in the old CDDB format. I have no desire
to unload a tar file with 38,000 files in it and then try to process them.

My intention is to have a program that takes a directory of MP3 files from
an album, and helps you locate the correct database entry. It's not simple
CD key retrieval, because these CDs may have several entries, and the
one in English may or may not the chosen one.

Before I re-invent the wheel, has anyone done this? Does anyone even
know where to ask?

TIA,

Geoff.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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