I'm happy to report that Phase 2, Digital Audio, is now online.

Attacks on the monitoring side of a compulsory licensing scheme will always be a worse business model than simply producing hit records. The music business exists as it is for a reason.

The MusicBrainz audio metadata project is very clueful, but the song identifiers it uses are flawed. MusicBrainz attempts to use audio fingerprints as primary keys to link metadata from different rips of the same song. To do this it uses a toolkit called TRM from a company called Relatable. TRM ids have severe drawbacks.

The Xiph Foundation (the people who brought you Ogg/Vorbis) have brought FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec into the fold. The Xiph foundation continues on a steady pace to round out its offering and save the free world FHG/Thomson.

A radically creative use for distributed computation points the way to a wildly inventive future.