What is Open CD Index

Welcome to Open CD Index project web site. Open CD Index is an open collaborative database where users can share information about Audio CDs. Usually there isn't any text information stored on Audio CDs (such as track titles, artist, album title, etc.) so we created this database on the internet so that CD audio management software can access it.

The first software title enabled to access Open CD Index is FreeRIP, an audio CD Ripper and Audio file converter published by MGShareware, but we hope than in a near future more software will benefit from this open index.

Collaborative?

We said that Open CD Index is a collaborative database because all the information it contains are supplied by users. This means that it can happen that information you retrive from this database are not totally accurate, but this also means that you can fix them and resubmit a more accurate version of them to the index, so that next user that will retrive that information, gets your revised version.

What do you mean with 'Open'?

Open CD Index software is Open Source Software distributed under the Gnu General Public License (GPL), and all the data collected by Open CD Index is, and will be, available to anyone under the same license.
GPL license will warrant all the users that collaborate to the project submitting information that their work will be owned by the community and will never be stolen by a single or a company.
Please browse our download section for more info.

Why we need Open CD Index?

As everyone knows many Audio CD databases exist. One of the oldest and most famous is freedb.org, which is an open source project as well, that had been active now for over 10 years. So you may wonder why do we need Open CD Index?

The fact is that freedb.org software had not been updated in a very long time and it lacks to collect a number of valuable info about our CDs. Things like a per track artist, tracks lirycs, and other details.
When we developed version 3 of our FreeRIP cd ripping software, we realized that those info were valuable for our users and we decided to create a new shared database, That database was once called FreeRIP CD DB, and worked well for about 3 years. Open CD Index is the evolution of FreeRIP CD DB.