MusicBrainz

MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata (this is information about the performers, artists, songwriters, etc.) storehouse to become a structured online database for music.[4][5]

MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz homepage
Type of site
Online music encyclopedia[1]
Available inEnglish
OwnerMetaBrainz Foundation
Created byRobert Kaye
URLmusicbrainz.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional (required for editing data)
Users~250,000 active ever[2]
LaunchedJuly 17, 2000 (2000-07-17)[3]
Current statusOnline
Content license
Part Creative Commons Zero (open data) and part CC-BY-NC-SA (not open); commercial licensing available
Written inPerl with PostgreSQL database

MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and the length of each track. These entries are maintained by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can also store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata. As of August 2022, MusicBrainz contained information on roughly 2 million artists, 3.3 million releases, and 27.5 million recordings.[2] End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as ALAC, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.

Cover Art Archive
Logo of Cover Art Archive

MusicBrainz allows contributors to upload cover art images of releases to the database; these images are hosted by Cover Art Archive (CAA), a joint project between Internet Archive and MusicBrainz started in 2012. Internet Archive provides the bandwidth, storage and legal protection for hosting the images, while MusicBrainz stores metadata and provides public access through the web and via an API for third parties to use. As with other contributions, the MusicBrainz community is in charge of maintaining and reviewing the data.[6] Until May 16, 2022,[7] cover art was also provided for items on sale at Amazon.com and some other online resources, but CAA is now preferred because it gives the community more control and flexibility for managing the images. As of August 2022, over 3.7 million images exist in the archive.[8]

Fingerprinting

Besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz also allows looking up recordings by their acoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, must be used for this.

Proprietary services

In 2000, MusicBrainz started using Relatable's patented TRM (a recursive acronym for TRM Recognizes Music) for acoustic fingerprint matching. This feature attracted many users and allowed the database to grow quickly. However, by 2005 TRM was showing scalability issues as the number of tracks in the database had reached into the millions. This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP (now AmpliFIND), replacing TRM with MusicDNS.[9] TRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008.

In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired by AmpliFIND.[10] Some time after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service began having intermittent problems.

AcoustID and Chromaprint

Since the future of the free identification service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought. The Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis for AcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský.[11] While AcoustID and Chromaprint are not officially MusicBrainz projects, they are closely tied with each other and both are open source. Chromaprint works by analyzing the first two minutes of a track, detecting the strength in each of 12 pitch classes, storing these eight times per second. Additional post-processing is then applied to compress this fingerprint while retaining patterns.[12] The AcoustID search server then searches from the database of fingerprints by similarity and returns the AcoustID identifier along with MusicBrainz recording identifiers, if known.

Licensing

Since 2003,[13] MusicBrainz's core data (artists, recordings, releases, and so on) are in the public domain, and additional content, including moderation data (essentially every original content contributed by users and its elaborations), is placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license.[14] The relational database management system is PostgreSQL. The server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products.

In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye.[15] On 20 January 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was the Barcelona, Spain-based Linkara in their "Linkara Música" service.[16]

On 28 June 2007, BBC announced that it had licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music web pages. The BBC online music editors would also join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database.[17]

On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.[18][19]

Client software
  • Amarok – KDE audio player
  • Banshee – multi-platform audio player
  • Beets – automatic CLI music tagger/organiser for Unix-like systems
  • Clementine – multi-platform audio player
  • CDex – Microsoft Windows CD ripper
  • Demlo – a dynamic and extensible music manager using a CLI
  • Exact Audio Copy – Microsoft Windows CD ripper
  • iEatBrainz – MacOSX, deprecated
  • foo_musicbrainz component for foobar2000 – music library/audio Player
  • Jaikoz – Java mass tag editor
  • Max – Mac OS X CD ripper and audio transcoder
  • Mp3tag – Windows metadata editor and music organizer
  • MusicBrainz Picard – cross-platform album-oriented tag editor
  • MusicBrainz Tagger – deprecated Microsoft Windows tag editor
  • puddletag – a tag editor for PyQt under the GPLv3
  • Rhythmbox music player – an audio player for Unix-like systems
  • Sound Juicer – GNOME CD ripper
  • Zortam Mp3 Media Studio – Windows music organizer and ID3 tag editor

Freedb clients could also access MusicBrainz data through the freedb protocol by using the MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway service, mb2freedb. The gateway was shut down on March 18, 2019.[20]

See also
  • List of online music databases

References
  1. "About". MusicBrainz. MetaBrainz. Archived from the original on 2015-05-08. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  2. "Database Statistics". MusicBrainz. Retrieved 2021-08-23.
  3. "WHOIS Lookup". ICANN. Archived from the original on 2015-04-02. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  4. Highfield, Ashley. "Keynote speech given at IEA Future Of Broadcasting Conference Archived 2008-04-22 at the Wayback Machine", BBC Press Office, 2007-06-27. Retrieved on 2008-02-11.
  5. Swartz, A. (2002). "MusicBrainz: A semantic Web service" (PDF). IEEE Intelligent Systems. 17: 76–77. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.380.9338. doi:10.1109/5254.988466. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2015-04-03. Retrieved 2015-08-28.
  6. Fabian Scherschel (10 October 2012). "MusicBrainz and Internet Archive create cover art database". The H. Archived from the original on 7 December 2013.
  7. "MetaBrainz Blog". MetaBrainz Blog. Retrieved 2022-08-04.
  8. "Database Statistics - Cover Art - MusicBrainz". musicbrainz.org. Retrieved 2022-08-04.
  9. "New fingerprinting technology available now!" (Press release). MusicBrainz community blog. 2006-03-12. Archived from the original on 2008-08-07. Retrieved 2006-08-03.
  10. AmpliFIND Music Services: News Archived 2013-09-21 at the Wayback Machine
  11. "Introducing Chromaprint – Lukáš Lalinský". Oxygene.sk. 2010-07-24. Archived from the original on 2018-10-10. Retrieved 2018-04-10.
  12. Jang, Dalwon; Yoo, Chang D; Lee, Sunil; Kim, Sungwoong; Kalker, Ton (2011-01-18). "How does Chromaprint work? – Lukáš Lalinský". IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. 4 (4): 995–1004. doi:10.1109/TIFS.2009.2034452. S2CID 1502596. Retrieved 2018-04-10.
  13. "MusicBrainz Licenses". Archived from the original on April 13, 2003. Retrieved 2015-10-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  14. MusicBrainz License as of 13-11-2010.
  15. Kaye, Robert (2006-03-12). "The MetaBrainz Foundation launches!" (Press release). MusicBrainz community blog. Archived from the original on 2011-05-19. Retrieved 2006-08-03.
  16. Kaye, Robert (2006-01-20). "Introducing: Linkara Musica". MusicBrainz. Archived from the original on 2008-09-07. Retrieved 2006-08-12.
  17. Kaye, Robert (2007-06-28). "The BBC partners with MusicBrainz for Music Metadata". MusicBrainz. Archived from the original on 2007-06-30. Retrieved 2007-07-10.
  18. Shorter, Matthew (2008-07-28). "BBC Music Artist Pages Beta". BBC. Archived from the original on 2009-01-24. Retrieved 2009-02-12.
  19. MusicBrainz and the BBC Archived 2018-02-20 at the Wayback Machine as of 2013-03-16
  20. "Freedb gateway: End of life notice, March 18, 2019". MetaBrainz Blog. 2018-09-18. Retrieved 2020-02-12.

Further reading
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