Sony to Buy Gracenote

Ian Lamont writes "Sony is buying Gracenote for $260 million. Sony will use Gracenote's online music database in its own digital content and devices, but Gracenote will operate separately and keep its own management. It's an interesting move, because many other entertainment companies and services depend on the Gracenote database, including iTunes, Yahoo, Winamp, and even the onboard stereo system used in some new Cadillacs. Gracenote has been criticized for turning the once-open CDDB project into a 'quagmire of heavy contracts, licensing fees, forced user registration and anti-competition clauses.'"

You've Got It All Wrong!

Gracenote has been criticized for turning the once open CDDB project into a 'quagmire of heavy contracts, licensing fees, forced user registration and anti-competition clauses.'

No no, you've got it all wrong! Sony's changing all that! I just installed a client that they started hosting that allows me to access the compact disc database. No contract, no licensing, no registration, just had to run a simple file called 'sony-mp3-finder-RIAA-notifying-kernel-rootkit.exe.'

Seriously, where does all this distrust and hate for Sony come from?

Re:

Show me a technology where they did not try to seek to tie people into their proprietary solution - Betamax, Memory Stick, MiniDisc, UMD, BlueRay, to name just a few.

Re:You've Got It All Wrong!

Walkman. Discman. Arguably both Sony's most successful consumer electronics products.

Re:You've Got It All Wrong!

The PS3 (with the exception of Blu-Ray) is pretty open. It's all Bluetooth/USB (including support for the plug and play standard for keyboards, mice, USB keys, external hard disks, and so on). The ones with MemoryStick slots don't care if you use it or not - you are free to do things that you would do with external storage (backing up game saves, copying media, and copying firmware updates) on USB keys, MemorySticks, SD cards, or whatever, depending upon your fancy. The only case in which it overtly favors something proprietary is that certain features (DVD upscaling, for example) are limited or not available unless you're using the HDMI port for video. However, it doesn't complain if you simply switch out for a HDMI to DVI cable and run audio on RCA cables.

In fact, it's downright weird to find proprietary things on the PS3 - GHIII's proprietary wireless dongles just make no sense in the context of how the system operates.

Re:

3.5" floppy
CD

And the PS2 had a Linux distro made for it - by Sony.

Re:Yes, they would sell you access to what you own

Sony should be ashamed

:DDDDD

Hilarious!

Re:

Sure they apologized

So did Kevin Mitnick, but he still went to prison. Why didn't anybody go to prison for XCP [wikipedia.org] (alternate less serious link [uncyclopedia.org])?

Yay!

I'm sure this is destined to be yet another rip-roaring success in the area of online music company purchases in the same manner as, errrrm, Napster, errrrr. Hang on a minute and I'll be able to think of one.

I guess...

... that's the end of that then...

freedb

What is this CDDB you speak of? Some crufty, proprietary version of freedb? I'm sorry, how is this relevant again?

Re:

For the same reason that Internet Explorer is a crufty, proprietary version of Firefox :) Try and kill off the free stuff and then charge for what they've got?

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Yeah sure, until the current administrators of FreeDB sell out as Ti Kan and Steve Scherf did, and another grubby little company tells lies about it's "open" intentions then locks out the existing users by changing formats and switching to a draconian lice

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http://musicbrainz.org/ [musicbrainz.org] The data is either public domain or covered under Creative Commons. I believe the software is GPL. Definitely a better alternative to CDDB and freedb.

Re:

What is this CDDB you speak of? Some crufty, proprietary version of freedb? I'm sorry, how is this relevant again?

<realitycheck>It's relevant because most of us are using iTunes.</realitycheck>

CDDB's Missing Features

Do you mean the version of FreeDB that is missing the spelling errors and the duplicates?

It's been said before ...

I've got a bad feeling about this.

SONY Loves Closed, Proprietary Systems

Sony's Obsession with Proprietary Formats [slashdot.org] -- "Obsessed with owning proprietary formats, Sony keeps picking fights. It keeps losing. And yet it keeps coming back for more, convinced that all it needs to do is push a bigger stack of chips to the center of th

Re:SONY Loves Closed, Proprietary Systems

Losses like BluRay, you mean?

Re:

I was pointing out that SONY has a certain type of positioning. An attitude. Their posture is to choose 'closed' systems and formats when they can, so they can control.

Re:SONY Loves Closed, Proprietary Systems

Blue-ray's hardly a win, yet. Sure, they beat HD-DVD. Good for them.

Then prices on Blue-ray shot up (gee, who'd have ever expected that to happen), early adopters have discovered that their expensive players can't play new Blue-ray discs thanks to Sony continuing to muck with the spec, leaving the PS3 the only future-proof Blue-ray player.

But thanks to Sony purposely crippling the PS3 in order to try and leverage what they viewed as their console monopoly into winning the HD format war, they lost out to Nintendo and Microsoft. Every game release that has a PS3 version and an XBox360 version is better on the XBox360, without fail. Check the reviews.

As an added bonus to Sony, just when they were starting to get close to actually making money on the PS3, the US economy started to collapse. Since Sony is a Japanese company which is based in yen, the falling US dollar is causing them to lose even more on every US sale than they were before. The US won't be seeing a price cut until the dollar stops its nosedive. The way the US economy is going, Sony may have to actually increase prices.

They did manage to "win" the Blue-ray war. They won by losing their strength in the console market, and they won just in time to have the US economy collapse so that they can no longer count on sales there.

To top it all off, the war they "won" wasn't really worth winning. HDTV adoption is picking up, but it's still a trifling fraction of the viewing population. Blue-ray became more expensive. DVD is good enough: Blue-ray won a meaningless war, at a great cost for Sony.

Blue-ray's victory is meaningless.

Musicbrainz

Use MusicBrainz [musicbrainz.org]. All the cool kids are doing it!

Seriously. Musicbrainz was created after the CDDB fiasco (and FreeDB had its own share of problems). It operates under a non-profit organization to guarantee its freedom.
And on that feature bullet-point list, they add an API to recognize what that "Unknown Artist - Unknown Title.mp3" file you have.

Re:

So how can I tell iTunes to use it?

I already have tens of GB of MP3s in iTunes that I burned from CDs myself -- and iTunes automatically looks up the tags in CDDB. I see that I can short-circuit that lookup and manually tag all the fi

Re:Musicbrainz

The comments regarding Picardtagger are good but if you want something automatic use ieatbrainz:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ieatbrainz/ [sourceforge.net]

Did you hear the sound loop on

the news announcement of the purchase? Yep, it was the sound of a flushing toilet (American Standard if I heard it right). Why a flushing toilet? Because Sony just flushed another part of the Internet multimedia experience down the shitter. All we can do n

Re:

Can't you just redirect the gracenote CDDB URLs in your hosts file, to the FreeDB ones?
(See Point 4 here. [freedb.org] )