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MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

musicbrainz.org

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Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#61

Post by mafro »

Freso wrote: post #41
corford wrote: post #27

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 m…

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/

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

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#63

Post by mrunkel »

frik wrote: post #60
unicornporn wrote: post #2

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 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 sta…

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.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#64

Post by distances »

corford wrote: post #27

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 m…

Hah, I did my own stat service too, inspired in early 2000's by AudioScrobbler and Last.fm before they joined forces. I was disappointed by the completeness and variety of statistics they offered, so the only option was to create my own.

My solution was to fill in full metadata for all my tracks, though, a pretty big task in itself that I also had to half-automate to achieve. I did consider how to release the stats service for others, too, but realized the number of people with impeccable metadata would be way too low.

My system is actually still running in the background, listening for MPRIS D-Bus track change events and writing them to a simple text file, occasionally flushing the changes from the file to a database for the stats display service -- written also with PHP like most web interfaces of the time.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#65

Post by pingiun »

StavrosK wrote: post #29

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 accurat…

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

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#66

Post by Freso »

mafro wrote: post #61
Freso wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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

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 's 7 item specific metadata fields (artist, track, album, trackNumber, mbid, albumArtist, duration) to https://listenbrainz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dev/json.html#... - 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/

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#67

Post by Freso »

soulnothing wrote: post #49

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.

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/ [2]: https://listenbrainz.org/

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#68

Post by exogen »

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…

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.)

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#69

Post by Freso »

sgentle wrote: post #57
Freso wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This looks like it: http://blog.datomic.com/2013/07/datomic-musicbrainz-sample-d...

Cheers!

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#70

Post by Freso »

reilly3000 wrote: post #58
Freso wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://github.com/Datomic/mbrainz-sample/blob/master/README...

Thanks! Looks like it's a fairly old post (and thus working with an old version of the schema), but still interesting to see how it's being used "out there". :)
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