Gracenote

Infobox_Company
company_name = Gracenote Inc.
company_
company_type = Subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America
foundation = 1998
location = Emeryville, California, USA
products = Digital music recognition technology
homepage = [http://www.gracenote.com/ www.gracenote.com]
num_employees = 95 (2006)

Gracenote, Inc. is a company that maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs. It provides software and metadata to businesses that enable their customers to manage and search digital media. Gracenote provides its media management technology and global media database of digital entertainment information to the mobile, automobile, portable, home, and PC markets. Several computer software applications that are capable of playing CDs, such as Winamp and iTunes, use Gracenote’s CDDB technology. Gracenote’s database was originally created from and continues to receive voluntary contributions from users.

In addition to its CD track-identification system, Gracenote operates a digital file identification service which allows digital music files (such as MP3s) to be identified, and a media management service for the generation of playlists, and recommendation of music.

On April 22, 2008, Sony announced that it would acquire Gracenote for $260 million USD. [ [http://www.gracenote.com/company_info/press/042208/ Gracenote News: Sony Corporation of America to Acquire Gracenote ] ] The acquisition was completed on June 2, 2008. [ [http://www.gracenote.com/company_info/press/060208/ Sony Corporation of America Completes Gracenote Acquisition] ]

Products

Gracenote offers a number of products including MusicID, Mobile MusicID, Music Enrichment, Discover, Playlist, Playlist Plus, Media VOCS, Classical Music Initiative, and Link. In April 2007, Gracenote launched the firstFact|date=June 2008 legal lyrics offering in the U.S.

Customers

iTunes and Sonicstage uses Gracenote’s CD track identification services. [ [http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61068 iTunes: What Is CDDB?] ] [ [http://www.gracenote.com/sec062706/SonySecurityNotification.html] ]

In addition, Gracenote provides its products to a number of other services including
*Online services including Yahoo! Music Jukebox, AOL Winamp;
*Home and Automotive products from Alpine, Bose, Panasonic, Phillips, and Sony;
*Mobile music applications from SamsungFor more information, see Samsung Music Center: [http://uk.samsungmobile.com/sg/pcstudio/music.jsp Samsung Multimedia Manager] ] , Sony Ericsson (TrackID), KDDI (Japan), KTF (Korea), Musicwave (Europe).

ee also

* List of online music databases

Notes and references

External links

* [http://www.gracenote.com/ Gracenote]
* [http://www.sequoiacap.com/company/gracenote/ Sequoia Capital provides venture capital funding to Gracenote]
* [http://wired.com/news/columns/0,72105-0.html Gracenote Defends Its Evolution - an interview of Steve Scherf by Wired Magazine]
* [http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/02/1955245 History of Gracenote Wikipedia Article discussed at Slashdot]