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Revision as of 01:36, 22 July 2004 by Dpbsmith (talk | contribs) (Completely new article about Gracenote)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Gracenote is a commercial enterprise which maintains and licenses a database containing the contents of CDs. The database is accessible online over the Internet. As of 2004 most mainstream computer software that is capable of playing CDs uses Gracenote or a similar service. 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 XCMD and an associated database named CDDB. XCMD 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 nothing more than the number and timings of the tracks. The matching is fuzzy and tolerates some imprecision in the track timings.
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 timings of the homemade CD match the track timings of the commercial CD to within a few seconds, the CDDB database can identify the CD successfully.
In 1998, Kan and Scherf sold the CDDB database to Escient, a high-tech venture firm, which founded 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 XCMD CD player program. The XCMD 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 XCMD 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 2004 Gracenote's database contains information on over a million CDs.