There are a number of apps that take iTunes/tag data and allows you to submit it elsewhere. No lawsuits from Gracenote, so that probably means they don’t care. Data is mostly a commodity nowadays. It’s service and solutions that matter to most music product developers. For someone to beat out Gracenote, they have to have those things. Only Mac(Rovi)sion has that kind of mojo currently.

Thanks for the suggestion about Rip. Rip really is a very serious cataloging tool. The way it switches easily between databases (you could even add menu hotkeys via Keyboard Maestro) for getting and sending track names is very impressive.

Unfortunately the ripper doesn’t accept LAME MP3. I understand that MP3′s are an inferior technology and not lossless but at extreme settings LAME is pretty good. More importantly MP3′s play almost everywhere. I don’t much feel like encoding everything into FLAC and then having a very narrow choice of playback software.

But it should be possible to use Rip for cataloging and iTunes LAME for encoding with no particular issues.

I also found iCDc (a cute pun on the rock band?) since I wrote the article, $15 shareware from France but it hasn’t had much work lately and doesn’t handle the switching between databases nearly as well as Rip. I’ll be donating to Rip and using it. I hope Rip will get some additional development.

Hi Robert,

Thanks for stopping by. I had a look at your peer review documentation. You guys are really pushing the audiophile envelope. That’s either a good thing or an awful thing. Sure it’s great to have perfect tags. On the other hand, it’s a lot better to have some kind of tags than none at all.

I think you need to separate the databases into peer reviewed and raw data I’m a pretty persnickety technical person (I run a programming and web development company) and I have trouble seeing me learn your whole complex system to submit my albums. I’m also not going to sit around typing into a web browser all day. Make it easier for us please.

KISS would seem to be the name of the game. And if you guys are doing better, you should continue to support FreeDB. I noticed and was impressed you have outgoing FreeDB format for those who want it. You should consider adding incoming FreeDB format.

In any case, thank you so much for your efforts to provide an alternative to a commercial service (which could just be cut off and buried any given day).

You can upload clusters of albums inside Picard with a plugin. But, I suspect that you are looking for a bulk method to uploads bucket loads of data.

We’re carefully considering adding support for this, but primarily it would be to easy to overload the community with data submissions. Consider this: As people enter data into MusicBrainz one release at a time, the peer review process has a chance to keep up.

Now, if we allowed users to bulk upload a 1000 albums at the same time and we had a 1000 users do that at the same time, we would create a mountain of peer review work that no-one is interested in doing.

Whenever we dream up new features for MusicBrainz is important for us to consider what this will do to our community. And the community is very important — MusicBrainz is not software. Its not data. MusicBrainz is a community that cares about data and software.

I hope this helps a bit.

Now, what FreeDB’s excuse is… I’m guessing that the project is essentially dead and on cron job life support.

Compact Disc > Submit metadata To > …

You could pull the data from Gracenote (via iTunes), which Rip can also do, or fill it in manually — and you could then push it on to FreeDB or Musicbrains, if you’re so inclined.

It’s a darn good ripper, too. Best one on OS X even though it’s still in beta:

http://sbooth.org/Rip/