grrr ....

I mailed Musicmatch to complain about a new "feature" that they have stealthily introduced in their latest "upgrade" - the abandoning of cddb.org for their lookups, in favour of their own lookup server. Which means that half our albums aren't found, because they were, presumably, too mean to pay Gracenote's fee.

and I got a reply today, where they very helpfully explained in words suited to AOLers how I could upload my own track listings. This is what I sent back:

"you're missing my point. I have no desire whatsoever to feed your database with my entries - why should I? I will shortly have paid for MusicMatch _twice_ - once on my own behalf, some years ago and once via the purchase of an iPod Windows package (of which I am awaiting delivery).

when you say you're "unable to access Gracenote's CD lookup engine", you presumably mean that you're not prepared to pay their rate. Leaving aside Gracenote's rather shabby behaviour in getting thousands of users to upload album and track data, and then start charging large sums of money to those software manufacturers who want to use it, the fact that you (MusicMatch) have changed this without telling anyone is completely unforgiveable, to my mind.

I am now ripping my albums using iTunes 3 on my iMac, because they have a licence for Gracenote and, frankly, life is too short for me to type in track names from our more obscure albums - we've already done it once."

I don't suppose it'll make a blind bit of difference, but at least I feel marginally better ...