MusicBrainz
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MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open content music encyclopedia. It is an online database of information about recorded music, not a database of music. Like the freedb project, it was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the CDDB. However, MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse.
MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and the length of each track. These entries are maintained according to a common [[MusicBrainz:StyleGuideline|style guide]]. Recorded works can additionally store information about the release date and country, the CD disc ID, an acoustic fingerprint for each track and have an optional free-form text field or [[MusicBrainz:AnnotationFAQ|annotation]] attached to them. As of June 2006, MusicBrainz contained information about 243,000 artists, 399,000 albums, and 4.8 million tracks.
End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to tag their digital media files, such as MP3s or Oggs.
MusicBrainz initially used Relatable's patented TRM (TRM Recognizes Music) for acoustic fingerprint matching. This feature attracted a lot of users and allowed the database to grow at a fast rate. By 2005 it became obvious Relatable's fingerprinting solution didn't scale well to the millions of tracks in the database and the search for a viable replacement began.
On March 12 2006, Robert Kaye posted an announcement on the project's official blog about a partnership between MusicBrainz and MusicIP. Part of the agreement allows MusicBrainz to use MusicIP's MusicDNS service for acoustic fingerprinting (PUIDs). After a grace period of 6 months, TRMs will be phased out and MusicBrainz will rely solely on PUIDs. MusicBrainz uses RDF/XML for describing music metadata, which is available for automated processing via HTTP GET and POST methods according to REST architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems.
MusicBrainz's core data (artists, tracks, albums, etc.) is in the public domain, and additional content including moderation data is placed under the Open Audio License (which is a Creative Commons non-commercial share-and-share-alike license). The server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. However, MusicBrainz uses a binary version of the Relatable TRM server, of which the source code is proprietary. The MusicBrainz client software library, TunePimp, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows use of the code in proprietary software products.
In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by their creator Robert Kaye.
On January 20, 2006, it was announced that the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data is the Barcelona, Spain based Linkara in their Linkara Música service.
Software
- MusicBrainz Picard - New cross platform album-oriented client.
- MusicBrainz Tagger - To be phased out Microsoft Windows MusicBrainz client.
- iEatBrainz - Mac OS X MusicBrainz client.
- Sound Juicer - Linux/GNOME CD ripper with MusicBrainz support.
- Amarok - Linux/KDE audio player with MusicBrainz support.
- PinkyTagger - Linux/KDE Masstagger with MusicBrainz support.
- libmusicbrainz - MusicBrainz client Library.
- TunePimp - Tagging library for developing MusicBrainz enabled software.
- Quod Libet - Linux/GNOME audio player with MusicBrainz support.
External links
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