Gracenote

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Gracenote Inc.

Type	Subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America
Founded	1998
Headquarters	Emeryville, California, USA
Products	Digital music recognition technology
Employees	95 (2006)
Website	www.gracenote.com

Gracenote, Inc., formerly called CDDB (Compact Disc Data Base), is a company that maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs and vinyl records. It provides software and metadata to businesses that enable their customers to manage and search digital media. Members of the public can also use it alongside software such as EZ Vinyl Converter when recording vinyl records onto iTunes. Gracenote provides its media management technology and global media database of digital entertainment information to the mobile, automobile, portable, home, and PC markets. Several computer software applications that are capable of playing CDs, such as Winamp and iTunes, use Gracenote's CDDB technology. Gracenote’s database was originally created from and continues to receive voluntary contributions from users.

In addition to its CD track-identification system, Gracenote operates a digital file identification service which allows digital music files (such as MP3s) to be identified, and a media management service for the generation of playlists, and recommendation of music.

On April 22, 2008, Sony announced that it would acquire Gracenote for US$260 million.^[1] The acquisition was completed on June 2, 2008.^[2]

[edit] Products

Gracenote offers a number of products including MusicID, Mobile MusicID, Music Enrichment, Discover, Playlist, Playlist Plus, Media VOCS, Classical Music Initiative, and Link. In April 2007, Gracenote launched the first^{[citation needed]} legal lyrics offering in the U.S.

[edit] Customers

iTunes and Sonicstage use Gracenote's CD track identification services.^[3][4]

In addition, Gracenote provides its products to a number of other services including

• Online services including Yahoo! Music Jukebox, AOL Winamp, and Pandora, Lala, and Tuneup Media;
• Home and automotive products from Alpine, Bose, Panasonic, Philips, and Sony;
• Mobile music applications from Samsung^[5], Sony Ericsson (TrackID), KDDI (Japan), KTF (Korea), Musicwave (Europe).

[edit] Licensing controversy

In 1998, the service was purchased by Escient, a consumer electronics manufacturer and operated as a business unit within the Indiana based company. CDDB was then spun out of Escient and then in July of 2000 renamed Gracenote.^[6]

In 1999, freedb, an open source clone of the Gracenote CDDB service, was created by former CDDB users who wanted a non-commercial alternative. The track listing database freedb used to seed its new service was based on the data released for public use by CDDB.

The CDDB database license was changed, and some programmers complained that the new license included certain terms that they couldn't accept: if one wanted to access CDDB, one was not allowed to access any other CDDB-like database, and any programs using a CDDB lookup had to display a CDDB logo while performing the lookup.^[7] The service was also no longer a free for everyone, requiring commercial developers (not end-users) to pay an "initial fee", as well as a license fee based on the usage of the servers and support.^{[citation needed]}

In March, 2001, Gracenote banned all unlicensed applications from accessing their database. New licenses for CDDB1 (the original version of CDDB) were no longer available, so programmers using Gracenote services were required to switch to CDDB2 (a new version incompatible with CDDB1 and hence with freedb).^[7]

The maneuver was controversial, and remains so to this day, because the CDDB database was and is built on the voluntary submission of CD track data by thousands of individual users. Initially, most of these were users of the xmcd CD player program. The xmcd program itself was an open-source, GPL project. Many listing contributors believed that the database was open-source as well, because in 1997, cddb.com's download and support pages had said it was released under the GPL^{[8] [9]}. CDDB claims that license grant was an error, and had modified the website in 1998 to avoid mention of the database's copyright status.^[10]

[edit] See also

• List of online music databases

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] External links

• Gracenote
• Sequoia Capital provides venture capital funding to Gracenote
• Gracenote Defends Its Evolution - an interview of Steve Scherf by Wired Magazine
• History of Gracenote Wikipedia Article discussed at Slashdot