title: How to access an offline copy of the GraceNote database?
body: <p>I am developing an application to generate many thousands of MP3 files for testing porpoises.</p>
  
  <p>I want it to have real and consistent, but random, artists, album &amp; track names which I will use to generate the file name and to insert ID3V1 tags.</p>
  
  <p>As it might be run a few times a day, each requesting information on 20,000 tracks, I thought that I would reduce GraceNote's server load by using a local copy of the database (this is a test app for my company, which is a large multimedia device manufacture who licenses GraceNote's technology, so I legally have a copy of the database).</p>
  
  <p>Question: in a hex edit, the first 4 characters of each database file are GNDB, which I presume stands for GraceNote Database. Since this seems to be a proprietary format, can anyone tell me how to access it?   (I expect that @cweichen can help answer that :-)</p>
  
  <p>I am a new hire in a huge company and no one seems interested in helping or even knows who our official contact person for GraceNote is. </p>
  
  <p>If I approach them through their website, I doubt that I can provide required information like developer ID, etc, so I am taking a three pronged approach by asking here while asking around to find our GraceNote liaison  person and developing using the web API, requesting only a few tracks at a time.</p>