I usually use Asunder to rip CDs for personal usage, and most of the times the CDDB database retrieves the correct tags for my disc. Sometimes however I stumble upon CDs that are either missing from the CDDB database, or need some minor adjustments. When I make such modifications, I would much rather share them (for others to use, or for my own use in the future) than have them rot on my local system.

In the past Grip had an option to submit modified CDDB entries from within the app, but nowadays neither Asunder nor EasyTAG provide such functionality.

Is there an easy way to submit a modified CDDB entry?


There are several clients that support freedb submissions. I've recently had success with fre:ac, which has a self explanatory process for this. If you prefer a command line option, jack is in the official repos and is supposed to support submission. An indicator on good clients may be the client submission statistics.

Note that the CCDB is a proprietary database by Gracenote, which seems only to support submissions from a few proprietary applications such as iTunes and QMP due to "licensing issues".


see freedb "submit new entries" howto: http://www.freedb.org/en/download__miscellaneous.11.html

Basically you can use email and HTTP POST submission but for details see the doc.

Also email method with example described here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1669680&p=10883530#post10883530

basically best is to use some program to do it for you. But I couldn't spot any searching now half an hour.


UPDATE: Option 1: I managed to update freedb. Use grip to generate the file in ~/.cddb/diskid, you can grep in the dir for it. I couldn't upload with grip perhaps because local mail is not setup. If you have local mail program working, you could as well use the cddb-tool to send email to server.

Then I went to gmail, create new message to [email protected] with subject cddb folk 0510db11 where you change folk to your CD genre and use the proper disk-id. Copy paste the cddb file into the message body. Switch to plain-text format. Last thing is very important. And it worked!

Option 2: use musicbrainz.org. Install picard. Open it and lookup CD. Then click manually lookup CD. There is a link to simple upload. Click it and enter CD information. Then create an account and click on the stub page you just created import as MusicBrainz release. Then enter a lot more information and you are done. Both things work for me. I wouldn't call that very easy...

If I knew everything, maybe option 1 is little easier as long as you are comfortable using command line and properly send the email. Option 2 is easier for GUI lovers.

Finally tested with k3b and it can download CD from both sources. I wish somebody created a freedb submit form..

P.S. FYI the test freedb email did not work for me. I've got no reply.


As of mid 2020 FreeDB is no longer available: Freedb.org Is Shutting Down, message from March 2, 2020. The former FreeDB Website URL currently redirects to MAGIX, a company selling proprietory music and multimedia software for Windows.

Trying to find an alternative I only found MusicBrainz, but you have to create an account and log in for adding/editing DiscIDs, album titles, song titles... A suitable software to do this seems to be Picard, although I haven't really used it myself (yet). It's in Ubuntu's universe repository and should be easily installed:

sudo apt-get install picard

I would also be insterested in how to submit a database entry using the Linux command line, but it may be better to use Picard (which is a GUI) because it allows to lookup pre-existing data and change it if necessary. I say this because using abcde I wasn't able to get the CD data, but using Picard I later found that it would have been available on MusicBrainz already. It seems I have to either setup abcde to use MusicBrainz or that the FreeDB Gateway isn't configured in my abcde settings, or that it is but doesn't function properly... I have to check, but this doesn't change anything regarding FreeDB being shut down...