It’s been quite a while since I released Offline FreeDB. In the meantime I’ve been too busy to go more into detail. Here at last I’ll show to you how to implement the fast Offline FreeDB Java library to query the FreeDB database and find information for almost any disc or bundle of music files you’re looking for.
How to recognize music content?
Having a glimpse at my media made me realize it’s hard to distinguish anything. Some files are poorly named and have no tags inside. Some files were named after their track title but without track numbers. Seems like I should have done a better job organizing my music 🙂
At least each folder only contains one disc! But listening through them all is no solution. I mean maybe for once, but each time I’m looking for an album? That would drive me crazy!
So this sent me to the internet in search of a solution. Well, there’s a whole bucket of tools, including Mp3Tag and MusicBrains. Each uses FreeDB – more or less.
For already-sorted albums, Mp3tag was awesome. But I met its limits very quickly. There is no way to look for unsorted files nor does it allow searching by unprecise tracks. For example shorter track lengths come into play, when programs cut off silence.
That’s why I decided to create my own tool. I had following requirements:
- Offline
- No query limits
- Lookup unsorted tracks
- Lookup with adjustable tolerance
- Fast response (less than 1 second each disc)
- Little memory usage