A few years ago, it was just a convenient tool to show what tracks you were playing on your CD – but now Gracenote is an important tool for people who listen to music on their PC or iPod, whether they know it or not.
We can think of few tools which have gone from a nice feature to being absolutely essential – the rise of personal digital music players has made online CD databases absolutely essential if you want to rip your 1000+ collection of disks and still stay sane.
Many users of Gracenote don’t even know they’re accessing the service – most applicatons just nip off and download the data without them realising. More recent changes to Gracenote have meant that applications must be licensed to use the database, and must display the Gracenote logo when they access the service.
The company estimate that 150 million units of Gracenote-capable software were shipped in 2003, and that this will rise to 200 million in 2004.
Gracenote
FreeDB – an open source CD database
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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