2.1. Supported Platforms

The Python-Module should run on all platforms, where communication through http-connections is supported from urllib module.

Communication to the CDDB-server takes place via a http-connection. For this reason, the computer must be connected to the internet in some way, when making queries. Default CDDB-server is http://freedb.freedb.org but the name of the used server can be chosen by the client application.

2.2. Installation

There are several ways to install PyCDDB on your machine:

• Use the RPM-Package for RPM-based systems.

• Run (as a priviledged user) the Python-Setup script setup.py from the source-distribution with install parameter: $ python setup.py install

• Copy the file PyCDDB.py to the apropriate Python-Libarary directory of your Python installation. This is for example /usr/lib/python-2.2 on a Unix-like platform

2.3. Usage

An example of how to use the PyCDDB-Module is given in the distribution (see file TestPyCDDB.py).

In general, 5 steps are required, to get information about a compact disc:

1. Get the disc-ID for the compact disc, you want to have the information about (line 1). You can use the discid-Program, which is available at http://discid.sourceforge.net or some other program, which generates the disc-ID in the appropriate form. The required format of the disc-ID for PyCDDB is as follows:

   8HexDigitID NumberOfTracks Track1StartFrame Track2StartFrame..TrackNStartFrame DiscLengthInSeconds

   If you want to use another program to generate the disc-ID for PyCDDB, it has to use the same format. Another well known program to calculate the disc-ID is cd-discid http://lly.org/~rcw/cd-discid/

2. Create an instance of PyCDDB (line 3)

3. Send a query to the CDDB-server, using the disc-ID (line 4)

4. Check, if the disc is known by the CDDB-server. For some discs, more than one entry exist in the CDDB-Database. in this case, you have to choose, which one to read (lines 5...12)

5. Get the information about the specified disc from CDDB-server (line 14).

6. Use information for whatever you want to (lines 16..20)

 1: discid = ... # get disc-ID from somewhere
 2: 
 3: db = PyCDDB.PyCDDB()
 4: items = db.query(discid)
 5: if len(items) > 0: # Items found?
 6:     if (len(items) > 1): # Multiple matches
 7:         print "Multiple matches found. Choose one of:"
 8:         for item in range(len(items)):
 9:             print "%d : %s %s" % (item, items[item]['category'], items[item]['title'])
10:         index = input("which item?")
11:     else: # single match
12:         index = 0
13: 
14:     info = db.read(items[index])
15:     if len(info['TTITLE']) > 0: # read info
16:         print 40 * '-'
17:         print "Title: %s" % info['DTITLE']
18:         for track in range(len(info['TTITLE'])):
19:             print "Track: %02d %s" % (track, info['TTITLE'][track])
16:         print 40 * '-'
21:     else:
22:         print >> sys.stderr, "Read-Status %d: '%s.'" % (db.status(), db.message())
23: else:
24:     print >> sys.stderr, "Query-Status %d: '%s.'" % (db.status(), db.message())

[ { 'category': 'rock',
     'disc_id': 'e512640f',
     'title': 'Caf\xe9 Del Mar Vol.5 / Caf\xe9 Del Mar Vol.5'
  },
  { 'category': 'misc',
    'disc_id': 'e512640f',
    'title': 'Caf\xe9 Del Mar / Volumen Cinco'
  },
  { 'category': 'data',
    'disc_id': 'e512640f',
    'title': 'Various / Caf\xe9 del Mar - Volumen Cinco'
  }
]				

{ 'TTITLE': ['Mumbai theme tune',
             'More than ever people',
             'Appreciation',
             :
             ...more track titles here...
             :
             'Close Cover'],
  'EXTD': 'Compiled with love by Jose Padilla \\n YEAR: 1998',
  'EXTT': ['', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', ''],
  'DISCID': 'e512640f',
  'PLAYORDER': '',
  'DTITLE': 'Caf\xe9 Del Mar Vol.5 / Caf\xe9 Del Mar Vol.5',
  'DYEAR': '1998',
  'DGENRE': 'Ambient'
}