Just to push home the awesomeness of crazy music nerds that together create MusicBrainz, please have a look at these two examples:<p>1. Number of releases per album individually tagged:
<a href="https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/f5093c06-23e3-404f-aeaa-40f72885ee3a" rel="nofollow">https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/f5093c06-23e3-404f-aea...</a><p>2. The amount of metadata for an album:
<a href="https://musicbrainz.org/release/b84ee12a-09ef-421b-82de-0441a926375b" rel="nofollow">https://musicbrainz.org/release/b84ee12a-09ef-421b-82de-0441...</a><p>When you get used to this kind of high quality metadata, it's just so so sad to see how companies like Spotify treat metadata. As an example, look up Bob Marley & The Wailers on Spotify and try to find original releases, and then compare that to the list found here:<p><a href="https://musicbrainz.org/artist/c296e10c-110a-4103-9e77-47bfebb7fb2e" rel="nofollow">https://musicbrainz.org/artist/c296e10c-110a-4103-9e77-47bfe...</a><p>...and the sad part is that the metadata is freely available, with a permissive license.
I've been contributing data and code to MB and it's sibling projects for over two years now and the community has been great from day one!<p>Just to name a few of the other projects, there's AcousticBrainz [1] collecting acoustic information which may be pretty useful for machine learning, CritiqueBrainz [2] for collecting user reviews of songs, albums and more, ListenBrainz [3], an open scrobbling service a group of people including former last.fm employees initially hacked together in a weekend, and finally BookBrainz [4], which tries to be what MB is but for books.<p>During the last year the people running MB have worked on getting companies using the data to support the project resulting in a quite impressive list of supporters [5] including big names like Google, Spotify and the BBC.<p>MB has also collaborated with our fellow data nerds over at the Internet Archive to create the Cover Art Archive. [6]<p>In general the project is run by people who equally love both data and hacking. Feel free to stop by on the IRC channels #musicbrainz and #metabrainz on freenode!<p>[1]: <a href="https://acousticbrainz.org/" rel="nofollow">https://acousticbrainz.org/</a>
[2]: <a href="https://critiquebrainz.org/" rel="nofollow">https://critiquebrainz.org/</a>
[3]: <a href="https://listenbrainz.org/" rel="nofollow">https://listenbrainz.org/</a>
[4]: <a href="https://bookbrainz.org/" rel="nofollow">https://bookbrainz.org/</a>
[5]: <a href="https://metabrainz.org/supporters" rel="nofollow">https://metabrainz.org/supporters</a>
[6]: <a href="https://coverartarchive.org/" rel="nofollow">https://coverartarchive.org/</a>
Wow. This brings back memories. At uni in the early 2000's I hacked up a geeky "last.fm" inspired music stat service. The idea was to be able to reliably track music being played without needing a plugin for winamp/foobar2000/other media player and without needing the mp3 file to have meta data.<p>I lightly modified a version of the Filemon driver from Sysinternals and wrote a little C program that used the driver to monitor for mp3s being played and then grab the perceptual audio hash of the file using trm.exe from Musicbrainz. It then sent the resulting fingerprint off to my website (written in glorious PHP3 no less!) and you could login with an account to see stats on the music you'd been listening to (done with meta data pulled from Musicbrainz).<p>Surprisingly, it worked reasonably well ...though very sure if I looked at the code now I'd run away screaming.<p>Really cool to see they're still going strong after all these years!
What (and when something) ends up on the first page never ceases to surprise. I've used this I don't know how long. Could it be 15 years? Their official tagging client (Picard) is OK, but I prefer tagging using Mp3tag and the MusicBrainz database.
I'd just like to reiterate how utterly amazing MusicBrainz is. It's so extremely useful that I decided to make it the backbone of a new playlist format I developed[1], one which (roughly) uses MusicBrainz IDs instead of filenames for playlists.<p>This makes playlists resistant to filename changes, moves, or even losing all the actual audio tracks and having to buy them again, all because MusicBrainz provides so accurate metadata.<p>[1]: <a href="http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/" rel="nofollow">http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/</a>
I love MusicBrainz and have been using it for a project of mine for the past few years. In the course of developing that project, I ended up making a GraphQL interface to the MusicBrainz API: <a href="https://github.com/exogen/graphbrainz" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/exogen/graphbrainz</a><p>You should try out the demo queries linked from that README if you want to get a sense of the depth of information available in their database.
I've been using MusicBrainz' Picard to tag my music files (that I acquired 100% legitimately, I assure you.) for a few months now.<p>They seem to have everything I throw at them, except for:
1) Extremely new releases (on the order of a-few-hours-after-release)
2) Some niche songs that haven't been officially released (soundtracks for some Korean television shows)
Heh. I was on a team of Amazon engineers in Edinburgh back in 2007 who were tasked with building "another IMDB that we can sell ads on", and we ended up using a MusicBrainz dump to start up a music encyclopedia website. The idea was to take the raw data but organise it in a more user friendly way, add easy click-to-edit user participation and gamification, etc.<p>I remember seeing Robert Kaye wandering around the office when he visited us to talk licensing terms, although as the most junior employee I didn't get to talk to him myself. We also chatted to Col Needham, the founder of IMDB, and asked him "so, how do you become a massive media-encyclopedia site?"; his answer was "it's easy, just start 17 years ago."<p>Really we had no idea what we were doing, and although we got some surprisingly dedicated users (we sent T-shirts to a couple who'd contributed hundreds of thousands of edits!), the site folded after a few years.<p>I'm very glad to see that MusicBrainz outlived us and continued to thrive :)<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20111005012125/http://www.soundunwound.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20111005012125/http://www.soundu...</a>
I discovered MusicBrainz Picard about a year ago and it handled my collection pretty flawlessly.<p>I was always wanting to know since then if there are other maintained/curated music databases.<p>I also didn't realize at first that they offer a public API. The Picard client was decent, but I'd be interested in a command-line solution. Does anyone know if this exists?
I used the MusicBrainz API a while back for a side project that got me sued for some reason (<a href="http://tcrn.ch/2rEox3h" rel="nofollow">http://tcrn.ch/2rEox3h</a>).<p>As I recall, it was pleasant to work with and did what I needed it to quite nicely, aside from a feature that my code had depended on being removed — anonymous/unauthenticated search — at which point the project was already basically dead and not worth trying to fix (that was just the last nail in the coffin). In any case, nice to see that it's still active.
The code that runs it is open too: <a href="https://github.com/metabrainz/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/metabrainz/</a>
always nice to see something of such utility pop up. musicbrainz has most assuredly been around for what seems like forever now, and there's a reason for that. their tag database is second to none as far as im concerned. unfortunately for me, the only music I keep locally is my own music that I've made, and I can almost guarantee that that wouldn't be on there. plus i tag all my music properly to a point that might seem religious and obsessive because I hate music files without metadata (which is why I export in mp3 as well as wav; wav for higher quality, and mp3 for labeling purposes; I could probably just use flac but compressed audio like mp3 also has the benefit of being less space intensive).<p>either way, nice to see it
I hope these guys don't flip like Gracenote did...Gracenote was all crowdsourced user contributions (for a long time at least) but then they closed off the data and sold it to Sony for $250+ million.
Whilst it is great to be able to tag music files with masses of MB metadata, I have a feeling that the true value of the MB database has yet to be realised.<p>Because of the underlying design and relationships between albums and recordings and musical pieces (or works), once it reaches some level of critical mass you can start to mine the data for things like:<p>Who has recorded versions of Vivaldi's Four Seasons Spring in London?<p>Which artists have recorded both Greig's Piano Concerto and Chopsticks?<p>Who has recorded "A Day in the Life" other than by the Beatles?
Datomic, Rich Hickey's majestic datalog-driven, time traveling database uses musicbrainz data for their tutorials. Check it out if you want to play with this data in a really novel way.
A related site - freesound.org<p>Both MusicBrainz and Freesound are truly international in scope. They cover metadata and sound for Indian classical music and such genres too. The CompMusic research team publishes to both of these.<p>Edit: CompMusic url - <a href="http://compmusic.upf.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://compmusic.upf.edu/</a>
One of my side projects is a music recommendation system. Music brainz has been great for this. Tying together all the music services out there. In addition the biggest perk is you can do a slave of their database, and have it replicate on an interval.
This was done once before. It was called CDDB.[1] That went from open to limited access to totally proprietary. Fortunately, this new one is under GPLv3, which makes it tough to pull that one again.<p>There's FreeDB (<a href="http://www.freedb.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.freedb.org</a>) which does roughly the same thing, starting from the old CDDB database before Gracenote, and then Sony, bought it. Their database dump is supposedly available.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB</a>
I've been trying to figure out which music metadata database is worth my time "improving", since there are three that are commonly used. MusicBrainz, Discogs and Rate Your Music. I use Discogs currently because you can expect high quality metadata, and I use that data in a Foobar2000 plugin to tag my music correctly.<p>It's the constant questioning I do for Wiki sites, since there are multiple for most subjects. Am I alone in this struggle? I wouldn't mind being talked out of using Discogs for the sake of creating / managing metadata that will be the most useful.
I tried to play with the API, but I almost always get "The MusicBrainz web server is currently busy. Please try again later.".<p>Is there a more reliable way to query this data without running a full server on your own?
It's good that MusicBrainz exists as open data project and continues to stand up against Sony America & Sony DADC defacto monopoly on audio+video metadata and digital supply for the media industry.<p>MusicBrainz is the third project of it's kind. Two previous older projects got bought by the media industry (Sony and Magix). Such a database gets useless if it doesn't receive updates.<p>First there was CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for software applications to look up audio CD (compact disc) information over the Internet. This is performed by a client which calculates a (nearly) unique disc ID and then queries the database. As a result, the client is able to display the artist name, CD title, track list and some additional information. CDDB was invented by Ti Kan around late 1993 as a local database that was delivered with his popular xmcd music player application. CDDB is a licensed trademark of Gracenote. In March 2001, CDDB, now owned by Gracenote, banned all unlicensed applications from accessing their database. As of June 2, 2008, Sony Corp. of America completed acquisition (full ownership) of Gracenote. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB</a><p>Then there was freedb. freedb is a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content is under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculates a hash function from the CD table of contents and uses it as a disc ID to query the database. If the disc is in the database, the client is able to retrieve and display the artist, album title, track list and some additional information. It was originally based on the now-proprietary CDDB (Compact Disc DataBase). On October 4, 2006, freedb owner Michael Kaiser announced that Magix had acquired freedb. On June 25, 2007, MusicBrainz – a project with similar goals – officially released their freedb gateway. The latter allows users to harvest information from the MusicBrainz database rather than freedb. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedb" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedb</a>