Gracenote posts

When Joris Kluivers (@kluivers on Twitter) set out to write his Lyrics app for iPhone, he never intended to personally take on Apple, Sony, and Gracenote. Kluivers, a student at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, was just trying to get his foot in the App Store door, not go toe-to-toe with three media behemoths. The story of how he ended up navigating through the corporate bulwarks to eventually successfully publish his latest release, Lyrics 2 (iTunes Link), with the blessings of all three companies, no less, makes quite the App Store saga.

The initial version of Lyrics was simple. Kluivers collaborated with Moop.me, a programming cooperative, to build his application. Published this past May, Lyrics was the first application on the App Store to allow users to find and display song lyrics. Several other similar applications followed in the weeks after.

Kluivers built the application around the LyricsWiki database. Featuring over 700,000 songs, the wiki provided easy access to a much-desired resource. It was exactly that access to a vast library of songs that caused the first of Kluiver's corporate challenges. Apple insisted on censoring his lyrics.

Read on to learn more about what happened...

Update: Our bad... the date on the MacRumors comment was in late April, and this recycled up into our queue due to an editing mixup. Apologies –Ed.

There's a new iTunes beta version out in developers' hands straight from Apple, and a forum poster over at Mac Rumors found a little something fun in the About screen: a reference to Gracenote's ability to identify Blu-ray discs. Gracenote is the service that IDs your CDs when you import them into iTunes, so you don't have to sit there and type all the track names and artist information in. Apparently Apple is mentioning that not only CDs and DVDs, but also Blu-ray discs, will get information from Gracenote in the latest version of iTunes.

This doesn't mean that Apple will adapt Blu-ray as a standard (though it would probably be about time, don't you think?). But it should mean that the future version of iTunes will include Blu-ray support, so if you happen to have a Blu-ray drive hooked up to your Mac, you'll be able to read or play the discs via iTunes.

It could just mean that Apple has upgraded the Gracenote version in their app, however, and that they have no plans to actually use it -- the text in the About screen could just be a boilerplate cut-and-paste from some required Gracenote documentation that happens to include "Blu-ray." We'll have to wait and see just what shows up in 8.2 when it eventually releases to the public.

A deal between Apple iTunes and Gracenotes may be in the works according to this recent Reuters report posted by PC Magazine. Gracenotes has gained the rights to legally distribute lyrics from BMG, Universal Music, Sony/ATV and other content providers. A deal between iTunes and Gracenote is a natural evolution of this acquisition, similar to the existing agreement that allows Gracenote to supply iTunes with track information. Gracenotes CEO Craig Palmer expects lyrics to provide up to $100 million in annual revenues by a decade from now. An iTunes deal would create a portion of those revenues.

TUAW recently showed readers how to add lyrics to iPods using iTunes' current features.

She was among the most mysterious figures in classical music: Joyce Hatto, a renowned pianist who retired from active performance in 1976 due to ill health. With the help of her husband and his private recording studio, however, Hatto released scores of recordings in the 1990s, performing the complete solo piano works of many composers including Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Liszt. Some suspected that Hatto might not have produced all her stunning performances herself, but prior to her 2006 death there was no sure confirmation.

It was one of Hatto's recordings of Liszt that Gramophone magazine writer Jed Distler popped into his computer in early February, and iTunes loyally searched the Gracenote database for a match. Found one, too -- but not to a Hatto CD; the disc matched another Liszt recording by pianist László Simon. When Distler pulled that CD from his collection and played it alongside the Hatto disc, they sounded precisely the same.

The ensuing cascade of suspicion, comparison, testing and confirmation is documented thoroughly in the Gramophone and Stereophile articles (and explicated further in the Pristine Audio and CHARM analysis pages), but the summary version: most if not all of Hatto's late recordings are apparently copied from other artists, some modified to hide the theft, some just duplicated as-is. If not for the surprise iTunes ID, this might have gone undetected for much longer. I've often seen iTunes and Gracenote make wildly inaccurate guesses when confronted with rare or custom CDs, but in this case I suppose that wild guess was forensically sound.

Thanks Jonathan!

[via Stereophile]