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MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

musicbrainz.org

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Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#51

Post by hashhar »

Leo_Verto wrote: post #36

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 p…

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.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#52

Post by 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) 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

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#54

Post by troymc »

Animats wrote: post #52

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 ) 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.wikip…

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

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#55

Post by yhager »

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…

I agree, musicbrainz is absolutely awesome.

I use it daily for a couple of year now (to clean up the tags in my collection - quodlibet integrates nicely with musicbrainz for that) - and very rarely I am playing something that's not there.

When this is the case I try to add/edit the metadata, but most of the time, they're way ahead of me.

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#57

Post by sgentle »

Freso wrote: post #47
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).

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

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#58

Post by reilly3000 »

Freso wrote: post #47
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).

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

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#59

Post by 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

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

Re: MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

#60

Post by frik »

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 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)

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