CDDB - History

History

CDDB was invented by Ti Kan around late 1993 as a local database that was delivered with his popular xmcd music player application. The application's change history first mentions the acronym CDDB in version 1.1 released on February 25, 1994. Users would submit new entries to the database via e-mail to Kan.

The database quickly became unwieldy and Kan enlisted the help of Steve Scherf to create a network accessible version of the database operating as CDDB Inc. in 1995. Graham Toal supplied hosting for the CDDB server and created a banner advertising revenue model to pay for the hosting. The original software behind CDDB was released under the GNU General Public License, and many people submitted CD information thinking the service would also remain free.

The project was eventually incorporated as CDDB LLC in 1998 and was soon sold by Kan, Scherf, and Toal to a high tech consumer electronics manufacturer called Escient. In a 2006 interview in Wired, Scherf claimed that Escient was the only company that would guarantee the continued development of the service by its founders, as well as protect the operation in an atmosphere where numerous companies were bidding—and in one case, attempting extortion—to acquire and immediately sell the CDDB to major players like Microsoft, which wanted a CD-recognition service but wouldn't deal directly with CDDB Inc.

In 2000, CDDB Inc. was renamed Gracenote. Early announcements asserted that access to the CDDB service would "remain 100% free to software developers and consumers." The license was nonetheless changed, and some programmers complained that the new license included certain terms that they couldn't accept. If one wanted to access CDDB, one was not allowed to access any other CDDB-like database such as freedb. Any programs using a CDDB lookup had to display a CDDB logo while performing the lookup.

In March 2001, CDDB, now owned by Gracenote, banned all unlicensed applications from accessing their database. New licenses for CDDB1 (the original version of CDDB) were no longer available, since Gracenote wanted to force programmers to switch to CDDB2, a new version incompatible with CDDB1 and hence with freedb.

The license change motivated many forks in the CDDB project tree, including the freedb project, which is intended to remain free software.

As of June 2, 2008, Sony Corp. of America completed acquisition (full ownership) of Gracenote, per the news note on the Gracenote website.