It’s 2020 and I’m still buying CDs. Today I sat down to rip some newly bought discs from Goodwill. Breaking out my tried-and-true abcde (which I wrote about exactly ten years ago, whoa!) led to the following, though:
$ abcde
Grabbing entire CD - tracks: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
CDDB unavailable.
---- Unknown Artist / Unknown Album ----
1: Track 1
2: Track 2
3: Track 3
4: Track 4
5: Track 5
6: Track 6
7: Track 7
8: Track 8
9: Track 9
10: Track 10
11: Track 11
12: Track 12
13: Track 13
14: Track 14
15: Track 15
16: Track 16
Edit selected CDDB data [Y/n]?
No CDDB available? What gives? This is kind of a problem, since the tagging and cataloging system I use needs at least a small amount of information with which to fill in gaps. The abcde utility is what provides this information, and without it I’d only be able to utilize folder names to find music. Boo.
A couple of Google searches later led me to the underlying reason: the FreeDB compatibility API run by MusicBrainz shut down in March 2019. Users were instructed to utilize the real API to get the same information instead of this one, which was only intended to help users transition from a defunct one to begin with. In other words, it was a temporary solution and now that temporary time period was up.
Okay, no problem. ABCDE has support for MusicBrainz lookups directly. Let’s give that a try:
# ~/.abcde.conf
CDDBMETHOD=musicbrainz
$ abcde
dasd: 1 16 150 187112 0
11212
19110
33122
47902
59057
69192
80295
91635
106160
120437
142710
152615
163525
168217
183207
Grabbing entire CD - tracks: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
No Musicbrainz match.
---- Unknown Artist / Unknown Album ----
1: Track 1
2: Track 2
3: Track 3
4: Track 4
5: Track 5
6: Track 6
7: Track 7
8: Track 8
9: Track 9
10: Track 10
11: Track 11
12: Track 12
13: Track 13
14: Track 14
15: Track 15
16: Track 16
Edit selected CDDB data [y/N]?
Wait, what? No MusicBrainz match either? Hmm. Looking up some information on that, it seems that my version of ABCDE was using this API to fetch information about discs (substitute $DISCID with the actual value obtained from cd-discid utility):
http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/release/?type=xml&discid=$DISCID
Navigating to that URL and putting in a random discid from my collection tells me why that API isn’t working: the version being used is deprecated, and all calls to the API just respond back with the URL to that blog post as the payload. There’s a newer version, of course, but ABCDE doesn’t speak it. Strike two.
Backing up a bit I came to find out that there are alternate servers for fetching FreeDB information. One in particular looked promising. Substituting its information into ABCDE finally (thankfully) yielded success:
# ~/.abcde.conf
CDDBMETHOD=cddb
CDDBURL="http://gnudb.gnudb.org:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi"
$ abcde
Grabbing entire CD - tracks: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13
Which entry would you like abcde to use (0 for none)? [0-3]: 1
Selected: #1 (Alanis Morissette / Jagged Little Pill)
---- Alanis Morissette / Jagged Little Pill ----
Year: 1995
Genre: Rock
1: All I Really Want
2: You Oughta Know
3: Perfect
4: Hand In My Pocket
5: Right Through You
6: Forgiven
7: You Learn
8: Head Over Feet
9: Mary Jane
10: Ironic
11: Not The Doctor
12: Wake Up
13: You Oughta Know [Alternate Take] & Your House [A Capella-Version] [Hidden Track]
Ahhhh, success. Finally I can get to actually cataloging the stuff in digital form. Thank you so much, GnuDb! Keep up the great work.