Free music database freedb will shut down on March 31, 2020

The online music database freedb will be discontinued as of March 31, 2020. The software of the same name will no longer be supported after that date. Freedb was one of the most popular tools to provide CD-ripped music tracks with the necessary metadata, such as artist, title and genre.

Freedb is a free online database of information on millions of music CDs. Since 2001, the computer program of the same name has helped users to fill in all the data on a CD, after it had been ripped to formats such as mp3, wav or flac.

Why freedb stops is unknown. Freedb.org doesn’t list a reason, but the decision likely has to do with the rise of streaming music services. These services automatically send along the most important information about a song or album, making a tool like freedb less necessary. Moreover, with the advance of streaming music services, fewer and fewer people are engaged in ripping CDs.

Freedb’s data was originally based on information from the Compact Disc Database. License changes meant that freedb was no longer allowed to use the CDDB data at some point. In the further existence of the service, the data was supplemented by the users. In 2006, freedb was acquired by Magix. It is that German software company that will pull the plug on the project on March 31.