(EDIT: Now up!
https://pmcdap.org/index.html)
PMCDAP (Production Music CD Archive Project) is a new website/archival project that I, with a couple of friends, have been working on for the past month. Our goal is for the site to become the "Redump" of production music CDs (for those who don't know, Redump is a database responsible for preserving and cataloging video games and other game-related media released on optical media, i.e. CDs/DVDs/BluRays); based on dumping albums into a "pure" disc image format. (Reasons why to do this over ripping tracks to WAV/etc. are explained in the upcoming FAQ.)
Our website features information about each album/media item, including the catalog number, company/label, release year, etc. However, like Redump, it does not offer downloads of the disc images itself due to legal reasons; it instead provides the hashes of each file, as well as image scans of the media (unlike Redump). The actual disc image files themselves will be stored some other place, likely some place more "secret".
As of this writing, a total of 922 albums (including samplers and CD-ROMs related to the music labels) are present in the database, the first 570 of which have a page in the database. These all come from my personal music collection. These include the vast majority of Carlin Production Music's library, including virtually everything released before 2000 as well as the entire Classical series and almost the entire Archive series before the switch to digipak after the Warner-Chappell acquisition. (still missing CAS 027)
The website is currently not available yet (the website exists, but merely shows a "coming soon" message). When it is, it will be available to any contributions, as long as they follow the instructions on the website. Hopefully, there will be many contributors who have production music that they're willing to preserve. As stated above, the files themselves won't be uploaded to the website, but they should be put somewhere "out there" so they won't end up "MIA", possibly a certain "Archive". But perhaps that should be discussed somewhere a little more private.
The website also features a series of lists of albums released on CD from many different labels, based on our research, as well as a more detailed collaborative spreadsheet to keep track of which albums are present/missing from these labels (contributions are also very welcome)!
Finally, there is a DAT file available for download, styled after ROM metadata DATs, which includes metadata about each album including a list of each file and their hashes. No programs currently have been developed to handle these DAT files (as far as we know of), but hopefully such programs will exist in the future.
I have attached several screenshots of the website for a preview of what it looks like. The website is basically complete in terms of functionality, but before we put it online, we still have one more possible legal issue that I would like to ask about:
This project directly hosts image scans of the media which may be a little legally risky. Would this be a serious enough concern, and if so, what are some ways (including a different, external hosting website) it could be worked around?
Anyway, hopefully we will be successful with our project and manage to keep it "afloat", and hope many people will contribute!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15VFcmpLGj05mKBfnO3iBnb7hWSuMaX2C/view?usp=sharinghttps://drive.google.com/file/d/17a0O0a0eEseJnYF30zI2JyfSeslynYQL/view?usp=sharing