Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

musicbrainz.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 96 posts

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#21

Post by jgillich »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #11
ozzmotik wrote: post #5

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 s…

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.

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)

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#22

Post by jacquesm »

buu700 wrote: post #14

I used the MusicBrainz API a while back for a side project that got me sued for some reason ( 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 t…

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

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#23

Post by 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...

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

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...

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

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#24

Post by jacquesm »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #18

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

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/), not sure if that is still kept up-to-date.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#25

Post by CharlesW »

jgillich wrote: post #21
nothrabannosir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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)

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.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#26

Post by Jedd »

knownothing wrote: post #7

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

tvnamer uses thetvdb.com's API in a similar way to picard / musicbrainz.

It's a great tool. I had one problem / wishlist that I couldn't work out, and got a response from the author a few minutes after filing an issue, explaining how to solve my problem.

There's some risk that thetvdb.com's change of API later this year may be a problem, but I suspect a low risk.

https://github.com/dbr/tvnamer , with packages available for most distros AFAIK.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#27

Post by 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!

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#28

Post by buu700 »

jacquesm wrote: post #22
buu700 wrote: post #14

I used the MusicBrainz API a while back for a side project that got me sued for some reason ( 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 t…

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

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...) 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.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#29

Post by 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/

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#30

Post by siddharth2610 »

nononononono wrote: post #23

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... 2. The amount of metadata for an album: https://musicbrainz.org/release/b84ee12a-09ef-421b-82de-0441... When you get used to this kind of high quality metadata, it's just s…

#test
Post reply on HN