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MusicBrainz

From Wikipedia, in a visual modern way
MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz logo since February 2016
MusicBrainz homepage.
MusicBrainz homepage
Type of site
Online music encyclopedia[1]
Available inEnglish
OwnerMetaBrainz Foundation
Created byRobert Kaye
URLmusicbrainz.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional (required for editing data)
Users~250,000 active ever[2]
LaunchedJuly 17, 2000; 22 years ago (2000-07-17)[3]
Current statusOnline
Content license
Part Creative Commons Zero (open data) and part CC-BY-NC-SA (not open); commercial licensing available
Written inPerl with PostgreSQL database

MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata (this is information about the performers, artists, songwriters, etc.) storehouse to become a structured online database for music.[4][5]

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 by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can also store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata. As of February 2023, MusicBrainz contains information on roughly 2.1 million artists, 3.5 million releases, and 28.8 million recordings.[2] End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as ALAC, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.

Discover more about MusicBrainz related topics

MetaBrainz Foundation

MetaBrainz Foundation

The MetaBrainz Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit based in San Luis Obispo, California that operates the MusicBrainz project and several other related projects.

Freedb

Freedb

Freedb was a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculated a hash function from the CD table of contents and used it as a disc ID to query the database. If the disc was in the database, the client was able to retrieve and display the artist, album title, track list and some additional information.

CDDB

CDDB

CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for software applications to look up audio CD 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 is a licensed trademark of Gracenote, Inc.

Compact disc

Compact disc

The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in October 1982 in Japan and branded as Digital Audio Compact Disc.

Cover art

Cover art

Cover art is a type of artwork presented as an illustration or photograph on the outside of a published product such as a book, magazine, newspaper (tabloid), comic book, video game, music album, CD, videotape, DVD, or podcast.

Acoustic fingerprint

Acoustic fingerprint

An acoustic fingerprint is a condensed digital summary, a fingerprint, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database.

FLAC

FLAC

FLAC is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data.

MP3

MP3

MP3 is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Originally defined as the third audio format of the MPEG-1 standard, it was retained and further extended — defining additional bit-rates and support for more audio channels — as the third audio format of the subsequent MPEG-2 standard. A third version, known as MPEG 2.5 — extended to better support lower bit rates — is commonly implemented, but is not a recognized standard.

Advanced Audio Coding

Advanced Audio Coding

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate.

Cover Art Archive

Logo of Cover Art Archive
Logo of Cover Art Archive

MusicBrainz allows contributors to upload cover art images of releases to the database; these images are hosted by Cover Art Archive (CAA), a joint project between Internet Archive and MusicBrainz started in 2012. Internet Archive provides the bandwidth, storage and legal protection for hosting the images, while MusicBrainz stores metadata and provides public access through the web and via an API for third parties to use. As with other contributions, the MusicBrainz community is in charge of maintaining and reviewing the data.[6] Until May 16, 2022,[7] cover art was also provided for items on sale at Amazon.com and some other online resources, but CAA is now preferred because it gives the community more control and flexibility for managing the images. As of August 2022, over 3.7 million images exist in the archive.[8]

Fingerprinting

Besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz also allows looking up recordings by their acoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, must be used for this.

Proprietary services

In 2000, MusicBrainz started using Relatable's patented TRM (a recursive acronym for TRM Recognizes Music) for acoustic fingerprint matching. This feature attracted many users and allowed the database to grow quickly. However, by 2005 TRM was showing scalability issues as the number of tracks in the database had reached into the millions. This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP (now AmpliFIND), replacing TRM with MusicDNS.[9] TRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008.

In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired by AmpliFIND.[10] Some time after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service began having intermittent problems.

AcoustID and Chromaprint

Since the future of the free identification service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought. The Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis for AcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský.[11] While AcoustID and Chromaprint are not officially MusicBrainz projects, they are closely tied with each other and both are open source. Chromaprint works by analyzing the first two minutes of a track, detecting the strength in each of 12 pitch classes, storing these eight times per second. Additional post-processing is then applied to compress this fingerprint while retaining patterns.[12] The AcoustID search server then searches from the database of fingerprints by similarity and returns the AcoustID identifier along with MusicBrainz recording identifiers, if known.

Discover more about Fingerprinting related topics

Acoustic fingerprint

Acoustic fingerprint

An acoustic fingerprint is a condensed digital summary, a fingerprint, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database.

MusicBrainz Picard

MusicBrainz Picard

MusicBrainz Picard is a free and open-source software application for identifying, tagging, and organising digital audio recordings. It was developed by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit company that also operates the MusicBrainz database.

Recursive acronym

Recursive acronym

A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in which Hofstadter invents the acronym GOD, meaning "GOD Over Djinn", to help explain infinite series, and describes it as a recursive acronym. Other references followed, however the concept was used as early as 1968 in John Brunner's science fiction novel Stand on Zanzibar. In the story, the acronym EPT later morphed into "Eptification for Particular Task".

AmpliFIND

AmpliFIND

AmpliFIND is an acoustic fingerprinting service and a software development kit developed by the US company MusicIP.

AcoustID

AcoustID

AcoustID is a webservice for the identification of music recordings based on the Chromaprint acoustic fingerprint algorithm. It can identify entire songs but not short snippets.

Pitch class

Pitch class

In music, a pitch class (p.c. or pc) is a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart; for example, the pitch class C consists of the Cs in all octaves. "The pitch class C stands for all possible Cs, in whatever octave position." Important to musical set theory, a pitch class is "all pitches related to each other by octave, enharmonic equivalence, or both." Thus, using scientific pitch notation, the pitch class "C" is the set{Cn : n is an integer} = {..., C−2, C−1, C0, C1, C2, C3 ...}.

Licensing

Since 2003,[13] MusicBrainz's core data (artists, recordings, releases, and so on) are in the public domain, and additional content, including moderation data (essentially every original content contributed by users and its elaborations), is placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license.[14] The relational database management system is PostgreSQL. The server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products.

In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye.[15] On 20 January 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was the Barcelona, Spain-based Linkara in their "Linkara Música" service.[16]

On 28 June 2007, BBC announced that it had licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music web pages. The BBC online music editors would also join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database.[17]

On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.[18][19]

Discover more about Licensing related topics

Public domain

Public domain

The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds the exclusive rights, anyone can legally use or reference those works without permission.

Threshold of originality

Threshold of originality

The threshold of originality is a concept in copyright law that is used to assess whether a particular work can be copyrighted. It is used to distinguish works that are sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection from those that are not. In this context, "originality" refers to "coming from someone as the originator/author", rather than "never having occurred or existed before".

Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the Ingres database developed at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1996, the project was renamed to PostgreSQL to reflect its support for SQL. After a review in 2007, the development team decided to keep the name PostgreSQL and the alias Postgres.

GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Richard Stallman, for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.

Library (computing)

Library (computing)

In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subroutines, classes, values or type specifications. In IBM's OS/360 and its successors they are referred to as partitioned data sets.

GNU Lesser General Public License

GNU Lesser General Public License

The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own software without being required by the terms of a strong copyleft license to release the source code of their own components. However, any developer who modifies an LGPL-covered component is required to make their modified version available under the same LGPL license. For proprietary software, code under the LGPL is usually used in the form of a shared library, so that there is a clear separation between the proprietary and LGPL components. The LGPL is primarily used for software libraries, although it is also used by some stand-alone applications.

MetaBrainz Foundation

MetaBrainz Foundation

The MetaBrainz Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit based in San Luis Obispo, California that operates the MusicBrainz project and several other related projects.

Barcelona

Barcelona

Barcelona is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within city limits, its urban area extends to numerous neighbouring municipalities within the Province of Barcelona and is home to around 4.8 million people, making it the fifth most populous urban area in the European Union after Paris, the Ruhr area, Madrid, and Milan. It is one of the largest metropolises on the Mediterranean Sea, located on the coast between the mouths of the rivers Llobregat and Besòs, and bounded to the west by the Serra de Collserola mountain range.

Client software

Freedb clients could also access MusicBrainz data through the freedb protocol by using the MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway service, mb2freedb. The gateway was shut down on March 18, 2019.[20]

Discover more about Client software related topics

Amarok (software)

Amarok (software)

Amarok is a free and open-source music player, available for Unix-like, Windows, and macOS systems. Although Amarok is part of the KDE project, it is released independently of the central KDE Software Compilation release cycle. Amarok is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later.

KDE

KDE

KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks, and a range of cross-platform applications such as Amarok, digiKam, and Krita that are designed to run on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, Microsoft Windows, and Android.

Banshee (media player)

Banshee (media player)

Banshee is a cross-platform open-source media player, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon Mono and Gtk#, it used the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and supports many portable media players, including Apple's iPod, Android devices and Creative's ZEN players. Other features include Last.fm integration, album artwork fetching, smart playlists and podcast support. Banshee is released under the terms of the MIT License. Stable versions are available for many Linux distributions, as well as a beta preview for OS X and an alpha preview for Windows.

Command-line interface

Command-line interface

A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and providing information to them as to what actions they are to perform. In some cases the invocation is conditional based on conditions established by the user or previous executables. Such access was first provided by computer terminals starting in the mid-1960s. This provided an interactive environment not available with punched cards or other input methods.

Clementine (software)

Clementine (software)

Clementine is a free and open-source audio player. It is a port of Amarok 1.4 to the Qt 4 framework and the GStreamer multimedia framework. It is available for Unix-like, Windows and macOS operating systems. Clementine is released under the terms of the GPL-3.0-or-later.

CDex

CDex

CDex is a free software package for Digital Audio Extraction from Audio CD and audio format conversion for Microsoft Windows. It converts CDDA tracks from a CD to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis. CDex was previously released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL); however, although the website claims that this is still the case, no source code has been released since 2005. It was originally written by Albert L. Faber, and is developed and maintained by Georgy Berdyshev. Recent versions of the software may be compromised and a security threat.

CD ripper

CD ripper

A CD ripper, CD grabber, or CD extractor is software that rips raw digital audio in Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) format tracks on a compact disc to standard computer sound files, such as WAV or MP3.

Exact Audio Copy

Exact Audio Copy

Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is a CD ripping program for Microsoft Windows. The program has been developed by Andre Wiethoff since 1998. Wiethoff's motivation for creating the program was that other such software only performed jitter correction while scratched CDs often produce distortions.

MacOS

MacOS

macOS is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and laptop computers it is the second most widely used desktop OS, after Microsoft Windows and ahead of ChromeOS.

Foobar2000

Foobar2000

foobar2000 is a freeware audio player for Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in configuration and customization. Standard "skin" elements can be individually augmented or replaced with different dials and buttons, as well as visualizers such as waveform, oscilloscope, spectrum, spectrogram (waterfall), peak and smoothed VU meters. foobar2000 offers third-party user interface modifications through a software development kit (SDK).

Jaikoz

Jaikoz

Jaikoz is a Java program used for editing and mass tagging music file tags.

Java (programming language)

Java (programming language)

Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. The Java runtime provides dynamic capabilities that are typically not available in traditional compiled languages. As of 2019, Java was one of the most popular programming languages in use according to GitHub, particularly for client–server web applications, with a reported 9 million developers.

Source: "MusicBrainz", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, February 17th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicBrainz.

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Further Reading

CDex

Discogs

Exact Audio Copy

Banshee (media player)

MusicBrainz Picard

Tag editor

Jaikoz

Gracenote

Mp3tag

Metadata

Puddletag

Kid3
See also
References
  1. ^ "About". MusicBrainz. MetaBrainz. Archived from the original on 2015-05-08. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  2. ^ a b "Database Statistics". MusicBrainz. Retrieved 2021-08-23.
  3. ^ "WHOIS Lookup". ICANN. Archived from the original on 2015-04-02. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  4. ^ Highfield, Ashley. "Keynote speech given at IEA Future Of Broadcasting Conference Archived 2008-04-22 at the Wayback Machine", BBC Press Office, 2007-06-27. Retrieved on 2008-02-11.
  5. ^ Swartz, A. (2002). "MusicBrainz: A semantic Web service" (PDF). IEEE Intelligent Systems. 17: 76–77. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.380.9338. doi:10.1109/5254.988466. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2015-04-03. Retrieved 2015-08-28.
  6. ^ Fabian Scherschel (10 October 2012). "MusicBrainz and Internet Archive create cover art database". The H. Archived from the original on 7 December 2013.
  7. ^ "MetaBrainz Blog". MetaBrainz Blog. Retrieved 2022-08-04.
  8. ^ "Database Statistics - Cover Art - MusicBrainz". musicbrainz.org. Retrieved 2022-08-04.
  9. ^ "New fingerprinting technology available now!" (Press release). MusicBrainz community blog. 2006-03-12. Archived from the original on 2008-08-07. Retrieved 2006-08-03.
  10. ^ AmpliFIND Music Services: News Archived 2013-09-21 at the Wayback Machine
  11. ^ "Introducing Chromaprint – Lukáš Lalinský". Oxygene.sk. 2010-07-24. Archived from the original on 2018-10-10. Retrieved 2018-04-10.
  12. ^ Jang, Dalwon; Yoo, Chang D; Lee, Sunil; Kim, Sungwoong; Kalker, Ton (2011-01-18). "How does Chromaprint work? – Lukáš Lalinský". IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. 4 (4): 995–1004. doi:10.1109/TIFS.2009.2034452. S2CID 1502596. Retrieved 2018-04-10.
  13. ^ "MusicBrainz Licenses". Archived from the original on April 13, 2003. Retrieved 2015-10-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  14. ^ MusicBrainz License as of 13-11-2010.
  15. ^ Kaye, Robert (2006-03-12). "The MetaBrainz Foundation launches!" (Press release). MusicBrainz community blog. Archived from the original on 2011-05-19. Retrieved 2006-08-03.
  16. ^ Kaye, Robert (2006-01-20). "Introducing: Linkara Musica". MusicBrainz. Archived from the original on 2008-09-07. Retrieved 2006-08-12.
  17. ^ Kaye, Robert (2007-06-28). "The BBC partners with MusicBrainz for Music Metadata". MusicBrainz. Archived from the original on 2007-06-30. Retrieved 2007-07-10.
  18. ^ Shorter, Matthew (2008-07-28). "BBC Music Artist Pages Beta". BBC. Archived from the original on 2009-01-24. Retrieved 2009-02-12.
  19. ^ MusicBrainz and the BBC Archived 2018-02-20 at the Wayback Machine as of 2013-03-16
  20. ^ "Freedb gateway: End of life notice, March 18, 2019". MetaBrainz Blog. 2018-09-18. Retrieved 2020-02-12.
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