Re: The competition

Nick Lamb (njl98r nospam at ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Fri, 24 Sep 1999 00:28:56 +0100 (BST)

On Thu, 23 Sep 1999 robin nospam at acm.org wrote:

> There is a long list of features, many of which are on our wish-list.
> Unfortunately, it looks as if it is totally proprietary this time.
> I've asked for developer information; we'll see what turns up.

They've made at least one important (but common) mistake -- they are
storing Unicode 16. That's not only a big waste of space, but the only
platform that's using 16-bit interchange is Win32, and it's anybodies
guess why they made such an odd decision.

If/when CDindex carries international character sets, I point you all
at UTF8 for a solution that's backwards compatible AND an efficient
use of transport/ storage space. What players do internally is of
course not our problem.

The other mistake they seem to have made is "supporting" only a single
platform. That's one CPU architecture, one manufacturer, one API.

Actually, I don't think I could have dreamed that CDDB would screw up
this badly... our chances are probably better than ever.

Nick.