My program is designed for people who are making their own local database
of a collection of CDs. It lets you look up many CDs in the CDDB in large
batches. It's used by hobbyists and also by professionals, like DJs and
music industry people. The data from CD Researcher is imported into a
database, usually FileMaker Pro.
I've been playing around with adding support for the CD Index to my
program, alongside the CDDB support. Since the program is already an
unusual CDDB client (looks up discs in batches, not just the one in the
drive), and I'm now making the same program be a CD Index client, I've
noticed a number of minor issues that I thought were worth mentioning.
-- How stable is the "http://www.freeamp.org/cgi-bin/cdi/hget.pl?"
URL? Is it reasonable to hard-code it into a program that's not a simple
CD Index client? Is the host likely to change? The path to the CGI
directory? The name of the script? The name of the "id" parameter?
-- I am currently parsing the HTML result from the hget.pl script in
a simple-minded way. I am ignoring the tags in a super-simplistic way,
and I'm assuming things about the HTML source to make my coding easier,
like assuming that each data item will be on a separate line. I'm
assuming things about the format of the output, like assuming that the
word Artist comes before a colon and the name of the artist comes after
it. Is this a good long-term way to extract the CD Index information from
a program?
-- CDDB entries use Latin-1 characters so they can accomodate
titles, performers, and track names with characters other than those in
ASCII. What's the CD Index approach for this?
-- CDDB has a few concepts that CD Index doesn't. Each disc has a
"category". I think this has little value, and I'm glad CD Index doesn't
have it. There's also extended data for the disc and for each track. Any
plans for further information for each CD for CD Index?
-- I can't tell from any of the examples how I'm supposed to handle
CDs with non-audio tracks. Most hybrid CDs with both sound and data hide
the data before the start of the first track, but I know that some CDs
have both audio and data tracks. I researched this when I started working
with the CDDB, and I discovered that the disc ID for the CDDB includes
all tracks, including data tracks, but the data in the CDDB entry has
track names (and extended data) only for the audio tracks, and it numbers
the audio tracks in a way that skips any data tracks as if they're not
there. What's the CD Index approach for these discs?
-- I did a lookup on an album with 15 tracks, Bad Religion's
"stranger than fiction", ID FUOVM1t7bROszZlP5Sk0Bzfp_Ow-. The returned
information is for an album with 17 tracks, presumably a different
version of the same recording with bonus tracks. Luckily, the first 15
tracks happen to match. What's the CD Index approach for this sort of
thing?
I'm also interested in hearing about any other free alternatives to the
CDDB.
-- Darin