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?
MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia
71–80 of 96 posts
Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> …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…
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
Also for AAC in particular there are a few options https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC
Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia
#73I 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?
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.
Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia
#74Whilst 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?
Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia
#75One 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.
Any more info on your recommendation system? Anything we can check out?
Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia
#76What (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.
Try Jaikoz (http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/). It's Shareware but very capable. Uses MusicBrainz and Discogs, fingerprinting and whatever.
Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia
#77Heh. 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...
Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia
#78Just 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…
"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.
Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"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 rea…
We may never have the stats Spotify has, but we are trying to get listening information via the in-development ListenBrainz: https://listenbrainz.org
I'm not sure when/if we'll be able to tie it in with MusicBrainz directly, but for someone like exogen, ListenBrainz may be a good basis to figure out relative popularity of various Recordings/Tracks regardless.
Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia
#80Heh. 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 offic…
Heh. It's about 17 years since MusicBrainz started now. :)