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Background
Gracenote offers a global database proving identificaion informaion . The database is accessible online over the Internet. As of 2004 many computer software applications that are capable of playing CDs use Gracenote's CDDB or similar services such as All Media Guide's AMG LASSO. These programs generally offer the option of contributing track listings, and most of the track listings in the Gracenote database are voluntary contributions by individual users of CD-player software.
It began in 1993 as an open-source project involving a CD player program named xmcd and an associated database named CDDB. xmcd and CDDB were created by Ti Kan and Steve Scherf. Because CDs do not contain any digitally-encoded information about their contents, Kan and Scherf devised a clever technology which identifies and looks up CDs based on TOC information stored at the beggining of each disc. A TOC, or Table of Contents, is a list of offsets corresponding to the start of each track on a CD. The matching is fuzzy and tolerates some variation in track offsets.
Some computer users who have copied vinyl LPs from their turntables onto CD-Rs have been astonished to find their computers correctly displaying the titles and track listings when these CD-R's are played on their computer. This happens when a commercial CD is a remastered version of an LP, containing the same tracks in the same order. If the track offsets of the homemade CD match the track timings of the commercial CD to within a second, the CDDB database can identify the CD successfully.
Controversy
In 1998, Kan and Scherf incorporated CDDB into a privately held company with investment from Escient, a high-tech venture firm. CDDB was then renamed Gracenote. The maneuver was and remains controversial, because the CDDB database was and is built on the voluntary submission of CD track data by thousands of individual users, who receive no compensation for their work. Initially, most of these were users of the xmcd CD player program. The xmcd program itself was an open-source, GPL project, and many listing contributors assumed that the database was free as well. However, at some point the code for xmcd was modified to append copyright notices to all submissions. How visible or open this was to contributors remains a matter of debate. Rightly or wrongly, many contributors of track listings were angered at the transfer of these listings to a profit-making entity which proceeded to make money by charging license fees for access to a database of track listings which individuals had contributed for free.
As of 2005 Gracenote claims that its database contains information on several million CDs. This number has been disputed, however, since user-entered databases such as Gracenote's have few quality controls to prevent duplicate entries of the same album with multiple incorrect spellings. Music industry experts have claimed that the actual number of released CDs globally since the introduction of the CD in the early 1980s is actually closer to six hundred thousand CDs, making Gracenote's claims seem dubious.