This article appeared on USA Today in 1999. Now, the the number of CDs in the CDDB, as well as user base and submissions figures are substantially larger. The company's name has also changed to Gracenote. Visit www.gracenote.com for information about CDDB® and other companion products/services.

Music lovers help database spin with more words

By Anthony DeBarros
USA TODAY

Every day, thousands of people use their PCs as ersatz stereo systems, listening to CDs while reading e-mail or juggling the family finances. Now a Web company is planning to add a layer of multimedia to the experience.

The company, CDDB Inc., already offers one of the handiest Internet tools for music fans, a searchable database of about 400,000 albums. The site also acts as a server, letting about 200 CDDB-enabled software CD players, including Winamp and RealJukebox, automatically fetch title, artist and track listing.

The next step is CDDB², which will offer detailed information such as expanded credits, artwork, links to Web sites and bonus materials, including exclusive songs. The company expects CDDB²-enabled players to appear next month.

"We're extending the life of the audio CD on line," the company's Ann Greenberg says. "It's what I call life after shipping."

It's also a timely step in what Net analyst Peter Clemente calls "the inevitable evolution of what music is."

"Music is a relationship between the artist and the consumer -- a very powerful, long standing relationship," says Clemente, of the Internet market research firm Cyber Dialogue. "This is a way of deepening the relationship with the music buying consumer."

The core of the service is the database itself, coupled with CDDB's method of identifying the discs people put into their computers' CD players.

The database grew out of Xmcd, a software CD player for Unix systems, in the early 1990s, its author Ti Kan, compiled album information to go with the player, taking submissions by e-mail from users. But the file's size grew unwieldy, and he worked with partners Steve Scherf and Graham Toal to move the data to the Web.

The site opened in 1996, and programmers began to add CDDB access to their CD players. In 1998, entertainment technology company Escient acquired CDDB, with Scherf staying on as chief scientist.

Today CDDB still gets its data from music fans via software CD players. With about 400 albums added each day, the company expects to pass a million this year.

"We've got this rather robust network of music fans," Greenberg says. "Because users can go in and correct the data, it's self-correcting. If someone's a fan, they tend to really care about the data being accurate."

But all the data in the world would be moot without CDDB's method of figuring out exactly which disc you've inserted into your CD player. CDDB-enabled players calculate an ID code from the disc's table of contents -- the start and stop times for each song.

Assuming your PC is connected to the Internet, the CD player sends the code, like a fingerprint, to the CDDB server, which searches for a match.

CDDB technology chief Ty Roberts says the system is so accurate that it can distinguish between reissues of the same album -- including 200 slightly different pressings of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon.

"Every six months, the record company might press another wad of (albums), and the numbers change slightly," Roberts says. "The system has to take into account these slight perturbations."

Indeed, the site is hard to stump -- in a one-man test, it easily returned accurate information for dozens of popular and obscure compact discs. Only occasionally did a message return saying the site could not find a match, and that was usually for new albums.

CDDB², however, will offer much richer content. Now, the service categorizes albums into 11 genres. That will expand to 252, including such off the pop-chart styles as speed metal and ragtime.

But Greenberg and Roberts, who came to CDDB from Ion, the company that pioneered multimedia on audio CDs, are most excited about the prospect of linking Web-based multimedia to audio CDs.

Insert a new CD, Greenberg says, "and the artist can come on and say, " 'Thanks for buying the CD; here's this free bonus track.'"

Because the content will be Web-based, it can change over time -- and be free of the software compatibility issues that have plagued enhanced CDs.

Also on tap for CDDB²:

www.gracenote.com