[General] [Contacting Us] [Server Sites] [FAQ]
General Information
CDDB was created for the enjoyment of Internet users everywhere. Use of the servers is free for private, non-commercial purposes. By using CDDB, users agree to the following:
Use of CDDB is solely at the risk of the user. This service is offered without any warranty, as CDDB cannot warrant the quality or reliability of service you may experience using CDDB. In no event will CDDB be liable for any damages incurred as a consequence of using CDDB. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone at our discretion. Many of our system resources are donated, and their abuse will not be tolerated.
Database entries submitted to CDDB become the property of the CDDB project. Users of CDDB are granted permission only for private use of CDDB services and data. Repackaging or redistribution of CDDB data is prohibited. If you wish to make use of CDDB in a commercial product, please contact us at our licensing email address.
If you would like to receive periodic mailings pertaining to CDDB,
you can join the CDDB announce mailing list by sending email to
announce-subscribe@cddb.com.
If you have any questions or comments at all about CDDB, we can be reached
via email at:
If you are interested in using CDDB in a commercial product, please contact
us at:
If you are a software developer who would like to support CDDB in your
application, you should contact us at the support email address. We
like to work with freeware and shareware developers to help them any way
we can. We also welcome commercial developers who wish to use CDDB; please
contact us for more information.
Contacting Us
support@cddb.com
licensing@cddb.com
Should you experience any trouble accessing any of the the CDDB servers,
please read the section on server problems in the FAQ Page
before contacting us. If after reading the FAQ you still believe there is a
legitimate problem with any of the public CDDB servers, please send us mail
to let us know. Include as much information as possible about your problem.
List of CDDB server sites
While our web pages are being restructured,
go here for the list of
cddb servers that you may need for your CD players.
The same page has some server statistics
on how much CDDB is being used.
CDDB Project FAQ
Error connecting to [server name]. Command Action = Socket_Connect failed
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What is CDDB? |
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What are CDDB servers? |
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How do I use the CDDB servers? |
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Can I develop an application that uses CDDB? Where do I get information on how to do this? |
If you wish to develop an application that uses CDDB, please let us know. We are interested in hearing a bit about your application. We'd also like to follow your progress and assist you in any way we can. Send us mail at support@cddb.com for questions or to tell us about your application.
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What should I do if I have problems accessing the CDDB servers? |
If it used to work, but now it doesn't after changing some program settings, RTFM again! It's likely that you messed something up.
If you're still not sure whether you're doing everything right, send email to the author of your CD player. Don't send us mail, we didn't write the program!
If you're sure you aren't doing anything wrong, it could be that your little corner of the Internet is experiencing difficulty. That's not unusual. Try using more than one server site. See the stats page for a list of sites to try if your program doesn't show you what your choices are. Rarely, a server site will become unavailable, which is why there is more than one to choose from. If you're able to talk to at least one, chances are it's just a network problem and there's nothing you can do about it. Just wait it out. This sort of thing happens all the time and usually sorts itself out. If you can't contact any of the servers, you could have a local network problem. Contact your ISP or system administrator for help.
If all else fails, go ahead and send us email. Make sure to explain your problem thoroughly and completely. We can't help you if you don't help us.
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How do I access CDDB if I'm not on the Internet? |
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Can you add a new category to the database? |
- We designed the existing categories to be very general, broad-based categories. This is to minimize confusion over categorization. With the current scheme, it should be fairly obvious what category most CD titles fall under. There are still some CDs that may fit under multiple categories, but if there were more categories to choose from, the problem would quickly become unmanageable.
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We get requests to add categories that are usually fairly specific
(e.g., "vocals", "rap", "Hawaiian", etc.). Some of these
seem like legitimate categories, but if we were to add these,
we would have to add disco, grunge, heavy metal, soft rock, industrial,
techno, rave, 60s-rock, 70s-rock, new wave, progressive, pop, top-40,
dance, easy listening, instrumentals, and these just to sub-categorize
the "rock" category. The classical cateory could be further broken
up into modern, romantic, classic, baroque, medieval, chants.
As to something like "Hawaiian", you can imagine that if we add
that then we should also have a category for every culture or ethnicity
in the world. An "international" category may be better, but what's
"international" to one country may be local to another.
Category proliferation is what we don't want to have.
- The xmcd CD database is now shared by a number of applications running on several different platforms. Some of these applications have a hardwired knowledge of the categories. Changing this would break existing applications, and would also require these apps to be modified and re-released. This is not an easy thing to do. Also, even after all apps have been converted to use the new categorization, we would have no control over all the older versions of the apps still in use around the world.
- If we add a new category, many entries in existing categories may need to be moved into the new category to make it "right". This is a task that we, or anyone else maintaining the CD database, are not prepared to do. There is no automated way to do this and it will be a very time consuming, manual chore. Moreover, we don't claim to have enough knowledge about all artists and titles to know what categories they fit under best.
- If you really have a CD that doesn't fit in one of the existing categories, then perhaps the "misc" category is where it belongs.
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Can I add new entries to the database? |
Submissions are sent via a specially formatted email message. Your CD player program does this for you when you submit the entry. Please note that if your entry is accepted, you will not receive any sort of notification. Entries that fail to meet the required criteria for acceptance are rejected, and an email rejection notice will be sent to you.
We currently receive over 200 new submissions every day from dedicated users. We greatly appreciate the effort!
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What are the guidelines for adding entries to the database? |
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For those CD players which treat the disc title and track title as one
field,
please use the "Artist / Disc Title" format for the disc title. Note that
artist name or group name comes first, and is separated
from the disc title with a slash character. Please
do not use other characters for this purpose. Also,
put a space before and after the slash.
Never use more than one slash in the disc title. For example, if you have a disc with "Jorge Bolet" performing "Franz Liszt" called "Liszt - The Piano Works Disc 1", do not enter it like:
"Franz Liszt / Jorge Bolet / Liszt The Piano Works Disc 1"
Since there should only be a slash between the artist and the disc title, do it something like this:
"Franz Liszt - Jorge Bolet / Liszt - The Piano Works Disc 1"
Alternately, you could just remove the composer altogether, because it's redundant:
"Jorge Bolet / Liszt - The Piano Works Disc 1"If the artist is more than one word, do not separate the words with a comma. For example, if the artist is "Louis Armstrong", do not enter it as "Armstrong, Louis".
If the artist name and disc title are the same, or if there is no artist name or disc title, then you should only enter the one unique title with no separating slash. For example, the album "Led Zeppelin" by "Led Zeppelin" should simply appear as "Led Zeppelin", not "Led Zeppelin / Led Zeppelin" or "Led Zeppelin /".
If there are more than one artist appearing on a CD, such as on compilations, the individual artists' names should appear in the "Artist / Song Title" format in each track title. For example, If the song "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II" by "Pink Floyd" is on track 1 of a disc, and "Stairway to Heaven" by "Led Zeppelin" is on track two, then the data for track 1 should look like this:
Pink Floyd / Another Brick in the Wall, Part II
and the data for track 2 should look like this:
Led Zeppelin / Stairway to HeavenIf you want to add more information than the artist name for a particular track, you should use the "extended data" fields for this. Such information might include the artist, composer, recording date, movement name (in the case of classical), et cetera. If your CD player software does not support the extended data fields, you should get a copy of one that does!
- Capitalize the first letter of each word only. Do not use upper case for whole words unless it's absolutely necessary.
- Please verify that all spelling is correct before submitting an entry.
- Submit to the appropriate category. Currently the following categories are recognized by the CDDB server:
- Do not send entries that are not completely filled-out (i.e., empty track titles, etc.).
- Send an entry only after you verify that it isn't already in the database. The server will discard duplicate entries.
- For compilation discs, specify "Various Artists" as the artist.
- For tracks with no name, specify "(Unknown)" as the track name. If a track has no name and contains no audio, specify "(Blank)" as the track name.
| blues | (self explanatory) |
| classical | (self explanatory) |
| country | (self explanatory) |
| data | (ISO9660 and other data CDs) |
| folk | (self explanatory) |
| jazz | (self explanatory) |
| newage | (self explanatory) |
| reggae | (self explanatory) |
| rock | (incl. funk, soul, rap, pop, industrial, metal, etc.) |
| soundtrack | (movies, shows) |
| misc | (others that do not fit the above categories) |
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Can I edit entries that are already in the database? |
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I submitted an entry to the database, but I got an email notice saying it was rejected. Why? |
When it does happen, the rejection email will contain a short explanation for the rejection. If you correct the problem and resubmit the entry, it should then be accepted (providing there are no further errors).
The most common reason for a rejection is if your submission contains illegal characters. Entries must not contain control characters, unprintable characters such as ^L (control-L), binary images, or non-ASCII or non-ISO-8859-1 characters. Some CD players check for these things for you before submitting entries, but not all of them do. In this case, it's up to you to make sure your submissions are "clean".
If you've tried everything and your submission is still rejected, check with the author of your CD player software. There have been cases in which bugs in CD player programs have resulted in bad submissions being generated. In such cases, the only solution is for you to get a fixed copy of the program. If you check, you may find that your problem has already been fixed in the newest version of your program.
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When I submit entries to the database, they always get rejected with an error message saying my charset is unsupported. What's wrong? |
If you get such a rejection when you submit an entry to the database, but you know for a fact that your submission is in a valid character set, then there are two common reasons for this. First, it's possible that you accidentally typed in garbage characters when entering the disc data. Check your submission to ensure that you didn't enter any disallowed characters such as control characters. Failing this, it is possible that your CD player software is specifying the wrong character set in the MIME header. Your CD player application may allow you to specify this information (if not, send mail to the author), and if so, you should try setting it to the correct value. If you have tried everything else, ask your network administrator to check the settings on your local SMTP server.
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Why does CDDB only support the US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1 character sets? |
First, most graphical interfaces allow the user to set an alternate font for display purposes, but as far as I know all the ones used by the popular CD player programs that support CDDB don't allow the application to easily change the font on the fly. Also, with X, not every font style and size is supported by all X displays. Some applications like Netscape do this but you will notice that it doesn't let you change to just any font. It gives you only a limited set to choose from, and limited range of sizes too. Perhaps it queries the X server to see what fonts are available. But there may not be an available font for some international character sets.
Some X font names have a form that contains the charset info element,
Here is an example:
-adobe-courier-medium-o-normal--25-180-100-100-m-150-iso8859-1
But, at least on my X display, there are very few charsets supported other
than iso8859-1.
To allow many charsets would assume that the user's X display contains support for these fonts, or use a font server on the network that does. Probably not a good assumption.
Even if it were feasible for applications to dynamically change fonts, it raises the question of how to map a charset to the appropriate font. For example, if a particular CDDB entry contains characters in the ISO-8859-9 character set, what fonts are capable of displaying those characters? For applications to know what fonts to choose from, there would have to be some sort of mapping table for each OS that CDDB applications may run on. I don't relish the idea of creating and maintaining such a set of mappings for multiple OSes, each currently having uncountable numbers of standard and custom fonts (with new ones constantly being added).
If we were to dispense with the idea of charset-to-font mapping tables, it would require that the user try viewing database entries with different fonts manually until he found one that looked right. This would become tiresome quite quickly, and violates our intent that use of CDDB be simple and automatic.
The second reason is that the text needs to be easily read. The CDDB server needs to parse the text of database entries for maintenance purposes, and this would essentially become impossible if different character sets were allowed.
Also, we periodically go through and hand-edit the database. I can't imagine trying to visually inspect entries if there were numerous character sets in the database. It would be totally impossible to inspect entries with multiple-byte character sets such as katakana.
Because of these reasons, we were forced to choose a single character set for the database. We chose ISO-8859-1 because it covers the vast majority of submissions that we expect to receive. We also allow a few other charsets that are very close to ISO-8859-1, or that are subsets of it. So far, it appears that this covers well over 99% of all attempted submissions. Supporting more than one character set would require a huge amount of work for very little benefit.
If developments arise in the computer world that make it easier to entertain the possibility of multiple character sets, we might consider doing so. Until then one will have to do.
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How long does it take for my submissions to make it into the database? |
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I'm stuck behind a firewall. How can I access the CDDB servers? |
If your firewall doesn't allow web access through, your only option is to convince your network administrator to configure the firewall to enable Internet web access. If this isn't possible, you can always put a copy of the database on your hard disk. See the section on how to access CDDB if you're not on the Internet if you want to do this.
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I put in an AC/DC disc, but the database says it's ABBA! |
The main reason this used to happen is because the 32-bit disc ID the server uses to identify CDs is not always unique, and sometimes two discs in different categories share the same disc ID. Version 1.4 of the server fixes this problem, so you shouldn't see this happen on the public servers.
Another reason this may happen is that two discs may share the same disc ID and also have similar TOCs (or "table of contents", which is essentially an array of track timings stored on the disc itself). This should be an exceedingly rare event, but because there is no other way to identify CDs there's little that can be done about it.
The least common reason this happens is that two different discs may share the exact same table of contents, which makes the two indistinguishable to the server. The good news is that the more tracks a disc has, the less likely it is to share the same TOC with another CD somewhere in the universe. So, for discs with two or more tracks, this probably (cross your fingers) never happens. (I've never seen it happen, at any rate.) It does happen sometimes for discs with only one track, because there are a relatively small number of possible TOCs for such discs.
Since the main problem has been addressed, you will probably never see this happen. If you do, bear in mind that there's really nothing that can be done about it.
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How come when I get a close match for a CD, it lists more than one entry for the same disc? |
For example, Led Zeppelin IV currently has 5 different entries in the database. Over the years, it has been reprinted numerous times, and many if not all of these have differing TOCs. If you insert your own copy of this disc and it's not found in the database, the server uses a "fuzzy match" algorithm to find a disc that is likely to be the correct one. The resulting list of matches from the search will include all 5 of these entries.
We have the capability to merge different entries for the same disc, but currently this is a time-consuming, mostly manual task. The next version of the server will automatically merge similar entries, so you will not see multiple entries for the same disc very often.
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Can I run a CDDB server on my site? |
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Can you add a new keyword to the CDDB specification? |
- Adding a new keyword would break existing applications. They've come to expect that database entries will only contain currently existing keywords. For obvious reasons, this would be bad.
- While it might be possible to add new keywords in some backward-compatible way, doing so would make managing the database a complicated task. Also, the database would initially need to be edited by hand to place existing, miscategorized information that might already exist into the correct field(s). This would be a herculean task.
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CDDB was designed to be rather generic, and we believe the existing design
allows for just about any sort of information. Adding new keywords would
just add complication and clutter. For example, the most common request has
been to add keywords for composer/author information, but the extended data
fields already exist for this purpose. If we were to add keywords for this,
where would we stop? There are many other seemingly valid reasons for
additional specific keywords, but we've chosen to have more generic, freeform
data fields.
Also, since we already have generic information fields for just about anything you might want to add, there would likely be overlapping purpose for any new keywords.
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It would be nice if CDDB could also include gifs or other images related to the disc. Is this possible? |
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I found a disc I've been looking for with your search engine. Can I purchase it through you? |
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I've been looking everywhere for a particular CD that's in your database, but I can't find it in any stores. Can you tell me where I can buy it? |
You might be able to find what you're looking for on our list of . Some of the sites listed there sell discs found in their listings. Please note that we are in no way affiliated with any of the sites we've listed here. This list is simply provided for your convenience.
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Do you own all the discs in the database? |
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I make my own compilation discs. Can I add these to the database? |
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I submitted entries to CDDB, but they haven't showed up in the search engine. What gives? |
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I found a CD listing that I was looking for with your search engine, but when I clicked on it, it just sent me back to the Lycos search page. Why? |
The web pages don't claim to offer any fancy data or sophisticated searching - it's a simple interface that just helps you find who sang what piece, or get a discography of all the CDs that a person made. If you can't find anything else it's because there's nothing else to be found.
If you have questions about how the search engine works, you can ask Graham Toal. He's the one who put it together and maintains it.
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How come I have to give my email address when I submit new entries to the database? |
We do keep a record of the email address from which each database entry was submitted, but we consider this information to be private and do not distribute it. We require this information if we need to contact a user in case of problems, and for the security of the database.
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Is my use of the CDDB servers private? |
We do not provide server usage data to anyone, other than the statistics shown on our server activity pages.
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When I try to download an entry, I get a funny error that looks like this:
Error connecting to [server name]. Command Action = Socket_Connect failed |
- Start Windows Explorer.
- Go to the WINDOWS directory.
- Locate WINSOCK.DLL. If it's not in this directory, to go WINDOWS\SYSTEM
- Right click on the file and choose Properties from the popup menu. You see the Properties for WINSOCK.DLL dialog box.
- Click on the Version tab.
- Check the File version. It should be 4.00.950 or higher and be copyrighed by Microsoft.
NOTE! If you need to install another winsock version, please backup the existing version (rename it to WINSOCK.OLD or copy it to a diskette)!
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