[Abcde-users] Submitting data to CDDB/FreeDB

[Steve McIntyre]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 03:24:16AM -0400, Gabriel Rosenkoetter wrote:
>On 2019-04-18 02:15 EDT, Christian Weiske wrote:
>> I did look into the FreeDB submission process.
>> You have to send an e-mail to a certain address, the subject has to
>> have a certain structure, and the body must be in a certain format.
>> The format is the same that you get in your editor when abcde cannot
>> find meta data online.
>> 
>> After manually editing that temporary meta data file, is there a way to
>> get its contents back after abcde has used it to tag the files?
>> This would be the first step for manual submission.
>
>Without (given it's 03:00 for me locally) even taking a glance at the
>code: yes. But abcde probably treats that as a transient file and nukes
>it when it's done with it. That's obviously easy to handle differently,
>as a fallback, but:
>
>> The API reference is hidden in a zip file at
>> http://www.freedb.org/en/download__miscellaneous.11.html
>> and is called "freedb howto v1.07".
>> 
>> It basically tells you to do a POST request to a certain URL with the
>> meta data file mentioned above as body.
>
>Cool! So… "we" (by which I mean abcde) should just Do That, probably.

Right, OK.

>I'm still juggling a few things personally, but I might be more familiar
>with some of the underpinnings than you are…? If you'd like to just go
>fix this, please do (and I'll be happy to review any patches, not that
>I'm anybody's idea of an "authority"), but if you've got better things
>to do, maybe shoot an email reminder at me directly in a couple weeks,
>if I haven't actually just done the thing?
>
>This seems like a pretty trivial API interaction, but also a non-trivial
>UI/UX change. It's the latter bit that I think bears community
>consideration. Right?

There is some vestigial code in abcde to send mail to freedb to allow
you to submit CD entries, but it's from before my time and I've never
played with it. freedb should be quite easy to work with like this. I
would *not* recommend doing the same with Musicbrainz, as they want
much more information for injecting CD data and we don't ask for all
that information. Instead, the code we have just transforms MB data to
look like cddb data.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
Who needs computer imagery when you've got Brian Blessed?