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Its not that they think we are stupid, its just we have better things to do with my time. Many geeks just do not realize people do not want to mess with technology; it just needs to work. This is why Apple enjoys its current market position. I all ways thought it funny people on this site criticized Apple for not putting enough features in the iPod, but rave about Unix and its many forms for doing the same thing: K.I.S.S. Try http://www.musicbrainz.org/ for tagging, it is about 80% right the first time and hit or miss after. Use the program and you will know what I mean.

Therefore every time you submit your MP3 TRM's to MusicBrainz, who in turn pass them onto relatable, his company can use that data to identify the songs on the P2P networks.

Far more accurate (although slower) than looking at the title of the files. Additionally, changing the metadata within the MP3 won't make a difference.

There are plenty of open source implementations...

Musicbrainz is a great way to fill in all the missing mp3 information and there is even an Amazon cover art grabber available if you search. I renamed about 4000 mp3's in the space of about two days doing this. ~S

Well there already is software that can tag/label your MP3s by identifying them through an "analog checksum." Check out MusicBrainz, which I found to have pretty good accuracy but the service is always so bogged down you can barely try it out.

Maybe if enough people donated to buy them hardware it might actually be useable, but it's kind of a catch 22 cause you can't really test it.

-- paper

I get to manually enter each track title.

Try musicbrainz tagger. It tends to do a decent job identifying tracks I've downloaded from... various sources. Not sure how well it will do with a track that was mp3->burned->mp3, but it might be a possibility.

I have all the info I need, and once I get Access to handle badly-formed ID3v3 tags,

Music Brainz can help you fill in missing or incomplete id3 tags. It creates an audio fingerprint of a song and then cmpares it to it's database, if it finds a match it updates the tag.

While we're on the subject, can anyone recommend a good id3 tag editor/mp3-renamer as a replacement for realjukebox? Getting rid of it would cut aobut 20 minutes off of my reinstall times.

http://musicbrainz.org

Unfortunately, there is only a Windows client at this point. I hope they will help more help soon.

Hang on, i recently used Musicbrainz to do just that - scan my whole mp3 collection and compare it with an online fingerprint database. Well actually that was more so that it would automatically rename my files and add the correct id3 tags.

The point is, these file sharing clients aint just gonna get hacked to bits, we are going to take the piss so far as to actually use this system to make the filesharing network work better - someone will release a kazaa-lite style hacked client that uses the fingerprinting to correctly identify files, delete fakes, add meta-tags and generally make our lives easier. RIAA, suck my cock.

I use MusicBrainz which actually works quite well. It's great for fixing those broken ID3 tags.

It is: Musicbrainz uses these psycho-acoustical properties to identify a song and then retags the file automatically for you using track names taken from a database that is updated by ultra-obsessive music geeks (such as myself).

MusicBrainz has been using these "TRM"s (essentially track ids) to identify music to correctly add ID3 tags to your music collection for some time.

The more people that use it, the more accurate and complete it becomes. It is basically a free CDDB replacement (the biggest one I think) but kind of works in reverse as well (matches mp3s to their associated CDs).

Kinda cool, check it out.

If anyone was interested they should know the code is in C++

oh well.

http://cvs.musicbrainz.org/cvs/mb_tagger/

Isn't this the kind of thing MusicBrainz was invented for. For those who don't know about it MusicBrainz is like CDDB, but you can look up files based on an audio fingerprint as well as the tag information. This means that files could be tagged completely wrong and you can still match them in the database. They provide open-source software for generating the fingerprints, interfacing with the server, and the server software (should you, for some strange reason want to run your own site). There's a pretty easy-to-use client for Windows, and I've been considering writing my own client for Linux.

3. Uniform ID3 tags - Nothing pisses me off more than opening up an MP3 I just downloaded and seeing the album name or artist name is "++{Ripped by tHe eNfOrCeRz}++" or something equally lame.

MusicBrainz invalidates this <li> O:-)

This isn't exactly a search engine but it helps out trying to identify music. I've used it with my CDs and it works surprisingly well.

" MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. "

They used the word "hashing" but it's actually more of "what does this actually look/sound like" type fingerprint rather than a hash like SHA1/MD4/MD5.

MusicBrainz uses a fingerprinting scheme like this to id music files by how they sound.

No, it didn't. There are "hashing techniques" specially made for audio - "audio fingerprinting" so to speak, like Relatable's TRM and Gracenote's MusicID which do a great job of it. They identify the file correctly no matter what the source is - lossless audio CD, or even 128kbps MP3, you get the same fingerprint.

I've tried TRM personally through MusicBrainz, and ran it on around 1000 of my MP3s, some of them really horrible quality, and it managed to identify 99% of them (TRM fingerprint correlated with actual metadata is stored at MusicBrainz). I was surprised, but yes, it did work. And this technology is rather old too, I'm surprised not too many people know about this.

And the article specifically mentions this fact: ...The experts' claims center on technology for detecting copyrighted works through "fingerprinting" (sometimes also called "hashing") technology that identifies songs by analyzing the content itself. Such technology, which is provided by several firms including Audible Magic, GraceNote, and MediaGuide...

How come Midway isn't making press releases too?

MusicBrainz::TRM does that. Also, there was the project Songprint (now defunct). The perl bindings for TRM (the part that listens to the song and makes a fingerprint) are currently broken. I can't manage to get them to work :/

The developers of musicbrains hang out on irc.freenode.net/#musicbrainz. They'll tell you to use libtunepimp, which can be found in their CVS repository on musicbrainz.org

There's an extremely cool website that is being developed by the audioscrobbler folks, Last.fm. It's a personalized radio station. You pick what songs you like, and it learns what you like. Very, very cool.

Check out MusicBrainz, it will fingerprint your ogg or mp3 files and compare the fingerprint against their database (all OSS btw) and send back the correct id3 tags, and save the music files into the directory structure you set up. If it can't find the files you can import missing albums in from freedb or put in albums yourself. It's gotten a lot better in the last year or so as far as the number of fingerprints it has. It's a very sweet system, I just finished tagging a collection of >100G of mp3s and oggs (from various sources) and it performed fantastically.

Right now the tagger program is only for windows, but the author just got a grant and will be working to develop linux and os/x taggers. The libraries are all OSS and there are a few (not as good) taggers written with them for other OSs.

I know why you said "mainstream" -- you didn't want anyone mentioning eMusic on you. But seriously, why? I've been brainzing my collection lately; I have probably 14 gig of stuff from eMusic. And 80% of it is quite good.

Incidentally, I seem to be sticking with eMusic, despite my earlier protests of their new plans. I'm downloading far less, but it's still worth the $10/month.

Also you might want to check out MusicBrainz. This worked really well for my collection.

I have decided to move to the not so popular .ogg format. Will this throw off the RIAA? I'm curious just how tech savvy these chumps are.

First, if the files are different in any way at all, wouldn't it give a completely different hash? Let alone a different format. What about encoding at a different bit rate?

Second, does the RIAA know about the ogg format? If everyone moves over, how long will it take before they notice?

Third, wouldn't it be better to use an audio fingerprinting scheme like musicbrainz uses to tag your files? It's similar to hashing but uses the actual audio qualities in the file.

Seems the RIAA is not only about 20 years behind in their business model, but they are about 20 years behind in technology.

My issue with the RIAA is, why can't they just say to the courts "This guy is downloading music confiscate his computer." There are no watchdog groups to make sure these guys are actually verifying that someone has the copyrighted information.

Can you imagine the bandwith costs the RIAA have just to download the number of files they do. Just so they can check the hashes on each file? Verifying the legality of files must be extraordinarily costly. Wouldn't it be great to start flooding their network with their own fake files just to WASTE (link pun intended) the RIAA's bandwith and time downloading the junk they disseminate?

Sorry, the sig field is temporarily out of order, you will have to read whatever I write here.

With all this hash talk going on, I thought I'd mention that Musicbrainz uses some sort of similarity hash in identifying songs. It compares the hashes of the files you have to an existing user submitted database. If the match is good, then you can use the database tag info, which is pretty handy.

I've compared albums I've ripped myself to the database and gotten "100%" matches (along with some matches of a much lower percentage) That leads me to think that if the RIAA kept its own database like that, they could do a whole lot of comparison with similarity or quasi-unique (ala MD5) hashes. I'd also venture that, with enough work at the comparison system, they could make court-valid assertions. They can hire plenty of geeks to handle the statistics necessary to call something 'beyond a reasonable doubt.' (for criminal proof)

Sean's business model seems a tad flawed. His new software has already been written, and an SDK is freely available here. Source code for both the Linux and Windows clients (which includes the fingerprinting code) is a click away under their downloads section. Redhat and Debian packages are there too, as well as Ruby and Perl bindings.. so fire up apt-get and go to it!

MusicBrainz already has a free music fingerprint program. It identified about 60-70% of my songs correctly. It also will rename your files and update the ID tags.

The 30-40% it did not find... I could easily find by doing some searching manually through the program.

It was a nice way to completely identify my mp3 collection. Yes, it's a legal collection, but I wanted an easy way to rename the files and id tags.

Anyhoo... the program is pretty buggy so save often. Help the cause.

Enjoy.

DavaK

I use the MusicBrainz tagger sometimes, and it works by comparing the audio signature of a song to the one in its database. This seems like the same sort of idea, but MusicBrainz tags files completly wrong a good percentage of the time, even listing the wrong artist - title info as a 100% match. I think this kind of technology has a ways to go before it could hold up in court or whatever.

Some large projects that are too complex to host on SourceForce move to California Community Colo Project. The MusicBrainz project actually raised enough money for two servers.

Some large projects that are too complex to host on SourceForce move to California Community Colo Project. The MusicBrainz project actually raised enough money for two servers.

I know after years of not having any money, and using shareware for free, I LOVE that I can afford to pay people who make shareware, and support independent software.

Recent shareware fees paid:

• 10 licenses of the Opera web browser
• A ton of Chank's fonts
• Limewire
• UltraEdit

Whenever I need a program/tool, the first places I look are TinyApps (very small software for Windows), and Tucows.

I sure HOPE it's not just me that's out there doing what I can to support the independent shareware programmers!

For those who don't know, Florian Schneider was part of Kraftwerk (musicbrainz), an experimental German pop duo (mostly) that was quite successful with electronic music.

Regarding the licensing, have a look at what MusicBrainz are doing. They're keeping the data free, but also planning to financially survive as a non-profit in some way...

if you read slashdot religiously like i do, you would know that this is being done. Its reallllly nice, i suggest you check it out

The whole point of MusicBrainz is that the data is open; some of it is public domain and some of it uses a Creative Commons license.

You can download the entire database from their site.

I know that OpenOffice has had problems running with glibc 2.3.1 (see this bug) so I find it interesting that it will be included. I haven't been able to get it to work, but RedHat must have worked around it somehow.

Check out Musicbrainz for an official description, but it's basically a music metadatabase like freedb or cddb.

Well, there's always Relatable and their audio fingerprinting technology. Given an MP3, you can get a key to determine artist, album, etc. Kind of like what Napster did in 2001. MusicBrainz uses Relatable for their community music database.

If you have four notes from a diatonic scale, there are only 20,736 possibilities (12^4, excluding timing variations.) Quite a bit under 50,000.

Here's an interesting page on Ogg Vorbis/MP3/etc getting the identity of what you are listening, called MusicBrainz. It is GNU open sourced.

While i believe there is/was at least one startup that was working to match music using a beats & tone analysis method that could match to songs that had been shifted or obscured in some way

That was Relatable.

i'm not sure this technology has ever been in real use.

Napster 10.x used it. MusicBrainz uses it.

11,000 albums heavily compressed to 160kbps still takes approximately 600gb

Relatable claims that its tech can identify songs down to 16 kbps.

A few categorization tools in development are using the MusicBrainz catalog. Bitzi (warning: I'm an interested party) is attempting to create an open metadata catalog for all content that can be encoded in files.

or it's Short Music for Short People...

//rdj

I think that collaborative filtering is a much better solution than a recommendation system, although only time will tell. The advantage of a collaborative filtering system is that it can be passive, not requiring any explicit input from users. The software can just examine your playlist, and (anonymously) upload the information to a server. (perhaps a username and password so you can identify the same user repeatedly, but no way to tie the username back to anything else)

If you want to get fancy, you could even hook a Gnutella client up to it, and have a virtual custom radio that downloads and plays music that it thinks you'll like. (except, of course, that would be illegal ;-))

I think the FreeAmp project is a great one; it's a cross-platform, GPLed, music player that even supports Ogg Vorbis.

It just needs a little love.

To make a smooth, free collaborative filtering system, we really need a free software implementation of music fingerprinting software, along with an open, non-profit database of songs. MusicBrainz is headed in that direction, but, they to, are tethered to Relatable's technology.

Does anyone want to step forward to work on music fingerprinting software, who is interested in using it for the good of consumers, without catering to the recording industry?

How about a collaborative filtering database for music? If you were willing to settle for per-CD resolution, it'd be pretty straightforward to add this technology to FreeCDDB.

-- Agthorr

Relatable's "player" is Freeamp, a very popular and well-known open-source player.

Relatable's "database"... you are probably thinking of MusicBrainz, another open-source effort which is really, really cool.

If you were to review the websites, you would see that relatable doesn't own either of these efforts, and are only associated with them through open-source goodwill. Their library is open-source LGPL. The folks behind musicbrainz were motivated to participate in it for the same reasons that you are pissed off at CDDB.

tune

First, relatable does not embed watermarks or signatures. They analyze the first 30 seconds of the wave form (yes, they will trim silence if they haven't started to already). This creates a unique id that is stored externally on a server somewhere.

Second, it's really accurate. A cover band will have a different signature than the original. Even a remix will have a different signature than the original. Two different versions of Beethoven's 9th will have different signatures.

Third, it's reliable. A vorbis encoding will have the same signature of an mp3 encoding. A VBR encoding will have the same signature of a CBR encoding. Low bitrate 24kpbs mp3s might have different signatures than 128kpbs mp3s but only because of the substantially degraded sound quality.

Finally, it's really a great idea. Artists can now opt in. Users can subscribe to certain artists. And if you have an mp3 out there that doesn't have metadata, you can use the Relatable TRM to connect to a metadata server like MusicBrainz, an open-source effort which stores the relatable ids and stores the metadata. Relatable is actually quite active and supportive of the open-source world. They are not even close to the bad guys here.

This is a great step for independent musicians. Using relatable (or other fingerprint technology, which is DIFFERENT than watermarking), artists can feel more secure about the authorship information remaining with their mp3s. Metadata servers can also store information about financial transactions. Mix in recommendation engines, and independent musicians have a great new option to compete with RIAA - internet-based, FREE, marketing and distribution.

I don't know if Napster is going to take advantage of all that stuff, but they might. Overall though, it's short-sighted to think of this as another "turn for the worst".

tune

MusicBrainz aims to be an RDF schema for all kinds of music metadata, complete with unique identifiers for tracks, artists, albums, etc. It solves the "various artists" problem that tends to plague other systems. The main thing I don't like about it is the fact that it uses a custom protocol and query language, which shouldn't really be necessary since RDF is RDF is RDF.

They haven't quite made their official release, but hop on over and show some support. The original data comes from FreeDB.

http://www.musicbrainz.org
------
Jacob Everist
wildmage@mad.scientist.com

They haven't quite made their official release, but hop on over and show some support. The original data comes from FreeDB.

http://www.musicbrainz.org
------
Jacob Everist
wildmage@mad.scientist.com

What does all of this have to do with napster and you? Well, freeamp allows you to download/stream music from emusic fairly easily (for a fee--something like $10 a month). So, if the napster distribution channel dries up, they become a quite attractive alternative. No more crappy searches, no more little red dots beside the songs, linux integration, artist-tipping support. Now, I'm not saying that emusic's actions here are good or bad, but do have a legal approach to digital music, while napster/gnutella/etc are questionable at the very least. They do support an open source project as well.

You're right of course about Napster taking it up the ass. But there was no other concievable outcome in this case. Napster has done us all a service by blowing the whole digital music scene wide open, but the fate of Napster is no longer relevant. Presumably they will find some smarmy MoR business model based on their "brand recognition"; the real action is moving elsewhere.

Check out the Tropus project: "napster with anonymity, by christmas 2000". This is intended to be a user-friendly front end for finding music on Freenet. There is already a proposal to integrate this with the MusicBrainz metadata system (conceived as a free and open replacement for the now-proprietary CDDB database.) We're also talking about a peer-based voluntary payment system so that fans can pay the artists directly - lots of info about this idea at Potlatch.net

We have to make sure that the RIAA parasites don't succeed in insinuating themselves between artists and audiences in the P2P space. Obviously they're going to continue to make obscene amounts of money either way, what they fear is a lack of control over what we choose to listen to and to support. So let's keep this freight train rolling - so long Napster, it was fun while it lasted...

Are there any places out there that let you search for CDs via the bar-code number the same way that Amazon lets you use the ISBN?

I'd like to see someone take that hack that directs CueCat scans to an Amazon page another step further...

I'd like to be able to scan the bar-code on the back of a CD and have a CDDB (or MusicBrainz, etc.) record be returned.

Obviously, you first would have to find a place to search the bar-code against and then filter those results and plug them into a CDDB query...

Well, I can dream anyway...


"Do no unnatural thing today." - Captain Flak