Welcome to FreeRIP CD Database project web site. FreeRIP CD Database is a collaborative database where users can share information about Audio CDs. Usually there isn't any text information stored on Audio CDs (such as track titles, artist, album title, etc.) so we created this huge database on the internet so that FreeRIP can automatically retrieve accurate CD information.
We said that FreeRIP CD Database is a collaborative database because all the information it contains are supplied by users using programs that supports it (FreeRIP only at the moment, but hopefully there will be other in the future). This means that it can happen that information you retrive from this database are not totally accurate, but this also means that you can fix them and resubmit a more precise version of them to the database so that next user that retrive that information, gets your revised version.
If you searched the web for CD information services, you probably find out that there are other services like this one. In particular there are two very famous: CDDB and freedb.org, so you could wonder why we didn't simply use one of them instead of building our own. Well, it's simple: CDDB became a commercial service and ask software developers a fee to use its services, while freedb.org, which is a very famous and widely used, and open source CD database service, provides very few information about each CD. As our FreeRIP loyal users know, FreeRIP version 2 fully supported freedb.org, but many users asked for more detailed information about CDs, like per track artists, Conductor, Mood, Lyrics and so on.
FreeRIP CD Database started as an indipendent branch from freedb.org CD Database data, this means that its data is and will be published as Open Source under the GPL license. Also we decided to publish all the sources of FreeRIP CD Database under the GPL license.
GPL license will warrant all the users that collaborate to the project submitting information that their work will be owned by the community and will never be stolen by a single or a company.
FreeRIP CD Database relies on the classic Open infrastructure: Apache, PHP and MySQL. At the moment it runs on a FreeBSD server. All the communication between the FreeRIP CD Database server and client is based on XML fragments exchange over HTTP.
As soon as we have a stabile version, we will write down a specs document so that other developers will be able to implement FreeRIP CD Database clients.
We had not yet released downloadable stuffs but we will soon. We will periodically release a full snapshot of the database contents, and the full PHP sources of the system. We will do it as soon as we have a stable (and hopefully well commented) version.