
MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia - hernantz
http://musicbrainz.org/
======
nononononono
Just to push home the awesomeness of crazy music nerds that together create
MusicBrainz, please have a look at these two examples:

1\. Number of releases per album individually tagged:
[https://musicbrainz.org/release-
group/f5093c06-23e3-404f-aea...](https://musicbrainz.org/release-
group/f5093c06-23e3-404f-aeaa-40f72885ee3a)

2\. The amount of metadata for an album:
[https://musicbrainz.org/release/b84ee12a-09ef-421b-82de-0441...](https://musicbrainz.org/release/b84ee12a-09ef-421b-82de-0441a926375b)

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:

[https://musicbrainz.org/artist/c296e10c-110a-4103-9e77-47bfe...](https://musicbrainz.org/artist/c296e10c-110a-4103-9e77-47bfebb7fb2e)

...and the sad part is that the metadata is freely available, with a
permissive license.

~~~
exogen
The amount of data is amazing – but I find that it's both a blessing and a
curse. It absolutely excels at the use case of tagging audio files (as a lot
of people here are noting), and as an encyclopedic reference (its purpose).
For other software integration use cases, where there is any ambiguity
involved whatsoever, a huge portion of code needs to be dedicated to deciding
which recording/release/etc. is the likely intended or "canonical" entity. I
find that the rankings from the search API are not nearly good enough for
this.

Consider a recording search for "smells like teen spirit". Any human with
cursory knowledge of pop music would point you at the Nirvana single from the
1991 release of Nevermind (in this particular case, it's likely even true in
every locale). But MusicBrainz has no notion of popularity, common sense, or
the real-world context of any of its entities, so the recording from Nevermind
isn't even on the first page of results. Heck, the first result isn't even a
Nirvana recording. The second result is from an obscure live bootleg album. In
my opinion this should be considered a bug. This stuff matters!

This is an area I've dedicated a lot of time to when integrating MusicBrainz
with my project, and it strikes me as something that MetaBrainz could spend
time on to make the platform more accessible. Answering simple questions about
music is currently quite difficult to newcomers on account of the overwhelming
amount of data. Consider a world where it's possible to stream every recording
from every release in the MusicBrainz database: it should be easier to make
"Alexa, play Dark Side of the Moon" work without it needing to ask whether I
mean the 1994 Netherlands CD release.

(FWIW, it's totally possible to build these heuristics on top of MusicBrainz
today, but having better built-in support for determining this stuff would be
nice. Spotify is absolutely amazing at figuring out what song in its entire
catalog should be the top result even when I've only typed a few characters.)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
"Canonical" can't apply to music releases in an objective and definitive way.

Context certainly matters (first, modified, compilation, remaster, remix,
audiophile pressing, and so on) but you can't even nail "canonical" to first
release, especially for singles, because there may be early promo mixes, radio
mixes, vinyl mixes, iTunes mixes, and so on - all mastered differently.

Most people's idea of "canonical" is really "The version I want to hear
without having to specify other details". But that's subjective and likely to
be significantly different for some non-trivial percentage of users,
especially in different territories.

Spotify probably just makes an informed stab at "most popular" \- which is a
good heuristic and will work most of the time, but is hard to calculate when
you don't have Spotify's stats.

~~~
exogen
You've described the issue pretty well, and I understand (and agree with!) all
of that – like I said, I've devoted a LOT of time to solving this.

> Most people's idea of "canonical" is really "The version I want to hear
> without having to specify other details". But that's subjective and likely
> to be significantly different for some non-trivial percentage of users,
> especially in different territories.

Yup! You are describing the problem literally any search engine faces. And
yet, Google/Bing/etc. provide pretty smart results. So, do you think the
"Smells Like Teen Spirit" recording by Francis Drake is the BEST first result,
as MusicBrainz says it is? Is a live bootleg recording the BEST second result?
In any locale? MusicBrainz is NOT primarily a search engine, but all that data
has very little value if people (and other software) can't actually find it!
This absolutely harms adoption.

OK, so we might not need to nail down a "canonical" version when we live in a
world with search ranking scores. I totally realize "canonical" is a bad word
choice on my part – but it's really how people think of these things!

> Spotify probably just makes an informed stab at "most popular" \- which is a
> good heuristic and will work most of the time, but is hard to calculate when
> you don't have Spotify's stats.

I bet they do it that way too, but I think you're throwing in the towel way
too early here. :) I have a system that works amazingly well and nearly always
chooses the most likely intended recording without any listen count data.
MusicBrainz has a LOT of data available to it, what type of heuristics might
make sense here? I use a ranking system that takes all these factors into
account and, like Lucene, assigns a score:

• Number of releases & release groups the recording appears on (the most well-
known recording is more likely to appear on additional albums like
compilations, and more likely to be widely released in lots of countries).

• How old the release is relative to the other search results (earlier matches
are more likely to be the original).

• Whether the recording is from a release with a "single from" relation to
another album (the target LP is more likely to hold the recording we want).

• Whether it's from a release that's an Album or EP (positive weighting), or
Live (negative weighting), whether the recording ONLY appears on Compilation
albums (negative weighting), whether it's any other type of release like
Bootleg (strong negative weighting).

• Whether the recording has ISRCs entered for it (more well-known recordings
are more likely to have ISRCs in the first place, and also more likely for
people to have entered them into MusicBrainz).

• Whether MusicBrainz users have entered any tags and ratings for it (weak but
positive correlation with how popular it is).

• Domain-specific string similarity metrics; essentially, query expansion that
makes sense specifically for song titles & artist names. This lets certain
matches remain equivalent when it makes sense (e.g. "mambo number 5", "mambo
no. 5", "mambo #5", "mambo number five" should all be exactly equivalent in
terms of string matching. Lucene does some of this already of course, but not
nearly enough – I have a query expander with hundreds of examples where Lucene
does a worse job)

I can think of more too, that my system doesn't currently use. All that's
without relying on any external data source! But if you want to go one better,
it's also possible to correlate results with other APIs like WikiData,
DBpedia, Spotify, YouTube…

In most cases, I've found that there's enough of a delta between the top score
and the second-best score to determine which one is "correct". (Yes, that
word, I know…)

Ideally MusicBrainz would be on par with a human expert in determining which
recording you most likely meant, and I believe that it CAN do this today, but
it doesn't.

~~~
exogen
Also, note: in theory MusicBrainz already has metrics for the number of
clicks, views, lookups, and edits certain entities get through their site and
API. I bet these are strongly correlated with listens/popularity.

~~~
narrowrail
>In theory MusicBrainz already has metrics

What does "in theory" mean here? Do those tables exist in whole or some part?
Is this a matter of indexing an existing data set or hoping some data was
acquired by accidental consequence?

~~~
exogen
I'm assuming it already exists due to the existence of pages like
[https://musicbrainz.org/tops/mb_top_stuff.html](https://musicbrainz.org/tops/mb_top_stuff.html)
and [https://stats.metabrainz.org](https://stats.metabrainz.org), I'm just not
positive of it. :)

Even if it's not collected though, it's data that they at least already have
the _ability_ to collect by simply flipping a switch, as opposed to spinning
up a whole new ListenBrainz service and hoping it gains traction.

~~~
Freso
Oh, and the mp_top_stuff.html page was created less than a week ago.

You're absolutely right that we could, in theory, have that data, but we do
not currently. Not in any usable form (for this purpose) anyway.

------
Leo_Verto
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!

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.

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.

MB has also collaborated with our fellow data nerds over at the Internet
Archive to create the Cover Art Archive. [6]

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!

[1]: [https://acousticbrainz.org/](https://acousticbrainz.org/) [2]:
[https://critiquebrainz.org/](https://critiquebrainz.org/) [3]:
[https://listenbrainz.org/](https://listenbrainz.org/) [4]:
[https://bookbrainz.org/](https://bookbrainz.org/) [5]:
[https://metabrainz.org/supporters](https://metabrainz.org/supporters) [6]:
[https://coverartarchive.org/](https://coverartarchive.org/)

~~~
hashhar
Cover Art Archive is an amazing database and I try to contribute as often as I
can. I have been able to find entire sleeves including lyrics, short anecdotes
etc. for a lot of obscure music I have.

------
corford
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.

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).

Surprisingly, it worked reasonably well ...though very sure if I looked at the
code now I'd run away screaming.

Really cool to see they're still going strong after all these years!

~~~
Freso
FWIW, you may be interested in ListenBrainz[1], an open alternative to
Last.FM. We're _just_ about to launch the beta which should be the milestone
for when we'll promise to keep submitted listens around Forever™. :)

[1]: [https://listenbrainz.org/](https://listenbrainz.org/)

~~~
mafro
Great work! Could you comment on the difference between your offering with
ListenBrainz and LibreFM?

~~~
Freso
Libre.FM sets out to be a ~1:1 (open) "clone" of Last.FM (or least the
AudioScrobbler part of Last.FM), while ListenBrainz aims to improve on
Last.FM/AudioScrobbler. E.g., the AudioScrobbler protocol only allows for a
given subset of metadata items to be submitted, while ListenBrainz's native
API allows you to submit basically all the data you have on the file.

Compare
[http://www.last.fm/api/show/track.scrobble](http://www.last.fm/api/show/track.scrobble)
's 7 item specific metadata fields (artist, track, album, trackNumber, mbid,
albumArtist, duration) to
[https://listenbrainz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dev/json.html#...](https://listenbrainz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dev/json.html#submission-
json) \- as ListenBrainz is part of the MetaBrainz "umbrella", one of our own
main highlights is that we can now actually submit _all_ MBIDs associated with
a file, not just the Recording MBID (ie., Artist MBID(s), Release MBID,
Release Group MBID, Track MBID, Work MBID(s), possibly Label MBID(s), etc.,
etc.), but also stuff like language, performers, AcoustIDs, ...

Also, ListenBrainz is linked up with MessyBrainz[1], which should work as a
buffer to have even listens submitted without MusicBrainz identifiers be able
to eventually get linked up to the MusicBrainz database.

[1] [https://messybrainz.org/](https://messybrainz.org/)

------
unicornporn
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.

~~~
frik
I fear now an entire generation (Gen Z) grows up with services like Youtube,
Musical.ly, Spotify and iCloud/GoogleCloud for their photos.

They never interact with images and audio files, they don't know about
metadata at all. They don't use notebook or a PC. They are vendor locked to
iOS or Android. They are not dumb, but less and less have the initiative
search around and try out new things outside the box. They stay inside their
apps, they don't know the vast web outside that can be searched with Google
search engine. (it depends on parents and schools to inspire them to try out
more)

~~~
mrunkel
Aww piffle. :)

It's not like the previous generation of people all explored the vast web.
They didn't. They didn't even use it until relatively recently.

The percentage of those that are intrigued by technology and have the
wanderlust to explore the digital landscape are probably exactly the same
(perhaps more now) as the previous generation. Those people that you refer to
as "vendor locked" now would never have even used computers in the past
generations, or used them only for Office apps.

------
StavrosK
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.

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.

[1]:
[http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/](http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/)

~~~
pingiun
I really like the idea of your universal playlist format, are there any
players that support it?

~~~
StavrosK
None yet, I'm afraid, although I'm writing a beets plugin to convert from pls
to UPL and back. The problem with the plugin is that it's just not that useful
unless you have a whole playlist manager to go along with it, which beets
doesn't do very well right now. I'd be very happy if there was a player with
good playlist management functionality that would support it, or that I could
write support for, but I don't personally use any...

------
exogen
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:
[https://github.com/exogen/graphbrainz](https://github.com/exogen/graphbrainz)

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.

------
half-kh-hacker
I've been using MusicBrainz' Picard to tag my music files (that I acquired
100% legitimately, I assure you.) for a few months now.

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)

~~~
TekMol
How does that work? How do you use MusicBrainz to tag music files?

~~~
detaro
> _MusicBrainz Picard_

is a metadata editor, doing both audio fingerprinting and manual tagging(while
fetching data from musicbrainz) where that is not available:
[https://picard.musicbrainz.org/](https://picard.musicbrainz.org/)

------
camtarn
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.

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."

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.

I'm very glad to see that MusicBrainz outlived us and continued to thrive :)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20111005012125/http://www.soundu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20111005012125/http://www.soundunwound.com/)

~~~
Freso
Heh. It's about 17 years since MusicBrainz started now. :)

------
bgammon
I discovered MusicBrainz Picard about a year ago and it handled my collection
pretty flawlessly.

I was always wanting to know since then if there are other maintained/curated
music databases.

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?

~~~
bombtrack
I will wholeheartedly echo the sibling's suggestion for beets
([http://beets.io/](http://beets.io/)).

No music makes it into my collection unless it's been imported via beets. It
has a powerful import/query/alter API, sufficient config options, and a nice
plugin system.

------
NelsonMinar
Full props to Robert Kaye, the founder. He's been raising this child for 15
years now.

~~~
jacquesm
They had a pretty close call at some point and nearly died. All is well that
ends well.

There also was freedb ([http://www.freedb.org/](http://www.freedb.org/)), not
sure if that is still kept up-to-date.

~~~
Leo_Verto
It seems like MAGIX Software is now running FreeDB.

As far as I understand it, it's data quality really isn't great and according
to their statistics [1], they've only had just over 7,000 album requests last
week.

[1]:
[http://www.freedb.org/en/statistics__album_requests.14.html](http://www.freedb.org/en/statistics__album_requests.14.html)

------
buu700
I used the MusicBrainz API a while back for a side project that got me sued
for some reason ([http://tcrn.ch/2rEox3h](http://tcrn.ch/2rEox3h)).

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.

~~~
jacquesm
So, given that you had already predicted you'd get sued, who sued you and what
for?

~~~
buu700
Well, I hadn't exactly predicted it — the quoted joke was from the top of the
site's FAQ page, meant to imply that users of the service would get in trouble
for being complicit in copyright infringement / piracy — but it also wasn't
all that surprising when it happened. I was sued by the current Napster
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster_(streaming_music_servi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster_\(streaming_music_service\)))
for alleged trademark infringement.

In the end we settled before it ever went to trial, so unfortunately that
quote never found its way into a court transcript.

------
hernantz
The code that runs it is open too:
[https://github.com/metabrainz/](https://github.com/metabrainz/)

------
ozzmotik
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).

either way, nice to see it

~~~
nothrabannosir
If all you're using MP3 for is the space saving and metadata, you might like
ogg/opus. It's the Opus codec (the state of the art in audio codecs right now)
in an Ogg wrapper.

You'll find a portable player capable of handling vinyl before you find one
that plays ogg/opus, but desktop software is mostly fine.

~~~
jgillich
VLC on Android supports opus. Unfortunately, most other players don't (I think
this is a actually a bug in the Android media scanning library and not the
players themselves though)

~~~
CharlesW
If an open source music format isn't a requirement for you, AAC is as
efficient as Opus and playback support is universal – no version of iOS or
Android has ever shipped without AAC decode support, for example.

Mp3tag also handles MP4/M4A files wonderfully.

~~~
lozf
AAC when well encoded sounds great, but there are too many sub-par encoder
implementations that just don't sound good - sometimes worse than MP3.

If you're encoding AAC use either Apples encoder, or one of those from
Fraunhofer:- Fhg-AAC available as a paid plug-in, or free with WinAMP, or the
Open Source FDKAAC implementation originally for Android, but now available
cross platform.

~~~
CharlesW
> _…there are too many sub-par encoder implementations that just don 't sound
> good - sometimes worse than MP3._

Whoa, I'd never imagined that could be the case and appreciate the heads-up.
I've only had experience with the Apple and Fraunhofer encoders so far.

Mind calling out the offender(s)? This summer I'm releasing a best practices
guide (and hopefully tools) to help podcasters move to AAC, and that would be
useful to mention.

~~~
0x0
The FFMpeg wiki has some information, including calling out its own "vorbis"
encoder as sub-par and not recommended (but apparently they also support a
different "libvorbis" encoder that does not suffer from problems?) See
[https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/HighQualityAudio](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/HighQualityAudio)

Also for AAC in particular there are a few options
[https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC)

------
knownothing
Offtopic question: Is there a similar tool for managing or tagging metadata
for movies and television?

~~~
vatys
[http://www.filebot.net](http://www.filebot.net)

Very powerful file renaming tool that also leverages TheTVDB, AniDB,
TheMovieDB, etc for TV and movies. Both GUI and command-line versions
available, I always use the (free) command-line version even though I paid for
the GUI.

It also accepts scripts, has smart/fuzzy matching, and is an all-around good
renaming tool for other things too.

------
theprop
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.

~~~
Freso
MusicBrainz was created partly as a reaction to Gracenote's handling of CDDB;
see [https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About](https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About) and
[https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About/History](https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About/History)

It would be completely against the spirit of the project to close in on
itself, and as Leo_Verto mentioned, also pretty hard. With the core data
available as CC0 and all the source code needed to run the servers, anyone
could legally take all the data and set up a "LibreMusicBrainz" in some hours
in the unlikely event that the MetaBrainz Foundation (the organisation created
to support MusicBrainz and the other *Brainz projects) should ever flip.

------
sod_uk
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.

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:

Who has recorded versions of Vivaldi's Four Seasons Spring in London?

Which artists have recorded both Greig's Piano Concerto and Chopsticks?

Who has recorded "A Day in the Life" other than by the Beatles?

------
reilly3000
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.

~~~
Freso
Link? I tried looking around in
[http://www.datomic.com/support.html](http://www.datomic.com/support.html) but
I couldn't find any references to MusicBrainz (or music data of any kind).

~~~
sgentle
This looks like it: [http://blog.datomic.com/2013/07/datomic-musicbrainz-
sample-d...](http://blog.datomic.com/2013/07/datomic-musicbrainz-sample-
database.html)

------
sriku
A related site - freesound.org

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.

Edit: CompMusic url - [http://compmusic.upf.edu/](http://compmusic.upf.edu/)

------
soulnothing
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.

~~~
Freso
Are you aware of the AcousticBrainz[1] and (upcoming/in-development)
ListenBrainz[2] projects? We at MetaBrainz (the organisation behind
MusicBrainz and the other *Brainz projects) really hope that the combination
of data MusicBrainz, AcousticBrainz, and ListenBrainz will enable powering a
lot of open recommendation engines. :)

[1]: [https://acousticbrainz.org/](https://acousticbrainz.org/) [2]:
[https://listenbrainz.org/](https://listenbrainz.org/)

~~~
soulnothing
No I was not thank you for sharing :).

------
Animats
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.

There's FreeDB ([http://www.freedb.org](http://www.freedb.org)) 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.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB)

~~~
troymc
GPLv3 is a _software_ license, i.e. not appropriate for data. I suspected the
folks behind MusicBrainz would know that, so I did some looking around and
found this:

"The MusicBrainz Database is split into two components for licensing purposes.

"Core data

"The core data of the database is licensed under the CC0, which is effectively
placing the data into the Public Domain. This means that anyone can download
and use the core data in any way they see fit. No restrictions, no worries!

"Supplementary data

"The remaining portions of the database are released under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This allows for non-
commercial use of the data as long as MusicBrainz is given credit and that
derivative works (works based on the CC licensed data) are also made available
under the same license."

Source:
[https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About/Data_License](https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About/Data_License)

------
MobesMobes
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.

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.

------
TekMol
I tried to play with the API, but I almost always get "The MusicBrainz web
server is currently busy. Please try again later.".

Is there a more reliable way to query this data without running a full server
on your own?

~~~
sod_uk
MB is a victim primarily of its own success - with a lot of Kodi clients
requesting data as well as MB's own tagger, Picard - but also of spammers
leeching bandwidth.

This is not the first occasion when demand has exceeded capacity, but any
capacity added soon gets swallowed up.

Suffice it to say that the MB team is urgently looking into how to stop this
happening.

------
lauretas
What about [http://linkedbrainz.org](http://linkedbrainz.org) ? Is it a dead
project?

~~~
Freso
LinkedBrainz is not something that the MetaBrainz team is directly involved
with, however, according to themselves, «[they are] back, if basic for now.»

(Note that there's also a "GraphBrainz" project (also not something MetaBrainz
is involved with), posted about earlier here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14479031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14479031)
)

~~~
lauretas
Looks like GraphBrainz stands for "MusicBrainz + GraphQL". Unfortunately, this
has nothing to do with RDF.

------
original_idea
mappable.com uses this to allow users to build a hierarchical
artist/album/song voronoi exploration tool.

------
frik
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.

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.

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.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB)

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.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedb)

