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MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

musicbrainz.org

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Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#41

Post by Freso »

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/

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#42

Post by Freso »

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…

Unauthenticated search is still possible and allowed, just as long as you use a proper User Agent string. See https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Development/XML_Web_Service/Vers... "Do I need an API key?" and "Do I need to provide authentication?" (In fact, I don't think there is a way to do authenticated searches.)

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#43

Post by Leo_Verto »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #18

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

I don't think I know anyone who loves open data and transparency more than Robert. MusicBrainz is open source to the core and all the development as well as most of the business stuff happens on public IRC channels and our JIRA.

It's been a crazy time lurking on IRC and seeing him juggle both huge technical problems that are worth more than a few blog posts as well as most of the business work for the last two years (until he recently hired someone to handle most of the latter).

Of course one shouldn't make this too much of a personality cult and there's always been an amazing team working with him but I can't imagine anyone other than Robert taking MusicBrainz to what it's become today.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#44

Post by Freso »

theprop wrote: post #34

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.

MusicBrainz was created partly as a reaction to Gracenote's handling of CDDB; see https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About and 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.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#45

Post by lozf »

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)

One workaround is to put your Opus audio in either a webm or mka container.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#46

Post by Freso »

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…

> 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

You could replace the WAVs with FLACs and save a bunch of space on that account. Maybe enough that you realise you don't need to keep both lossless (WAV/FLAC) and lossy (MP3) copies around. Since FLAC is lossless, it will have the exact same audio quality as the WAV files they'll be sourced from. (And, as you mention, FLAC supports tags directly.)

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#47

Post by Freso »

reilly3000 wrote: post #10

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.

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).

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#48

Post by lozf »

CharlesW wrote: post #25
jgillich wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#50

Post by CharlesW »

lozf wrote: post #48
CharlesW wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 to mention.

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