Music database service freeDB shutting down in March, 2020

The tracklisting database service freeBD – which is used to find out album and song titles for music tracks on a CD – is going to bid adieu in a few months. Simply put, it’s a service used by multiple applications to rip a music CD, saving the digital versions of a music track in different formats.

Going by a notification now displaying at freedb.org, the website will cease operations by the end of the first quarter in the coming year, ie. March 31, 2020.

freedb.org and its services will be shut down on March 31st of 2020.

Any reason for the closure? Well, the short and crisp notice doesn’t reveal any information about why the service is being terminated all of a sudden.

FYI, in the absence of such databases, what users may get to see is a group of nameless files without any information about the artist, song/album title, and other details. Adding all that info manually would indeed be a pain, and that’s where alternatives to freeDB come to play.

For those of you who’ve been using freeDB and would require an alternative to the service after its closure, MusicBrainz, beets, Gracenote (earlier called Compact Disc Data Base or CDDB), Musera, ACRCloud, etc are some of the services that you can give a try.

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