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Open Content Music Database Launched
An anonymous reader writes "The open source music database MusicBrainz was launched officially today. The data is partly in the public domain, partly under an open content like license. It includes artist/album/track information, with more to come. There's support for CDDB-like CD identification (actually, a lot of the current data was imported from freedb), but also identification of single tracks via audio fingerprints (TRMs). Help both in adding new content by tagging your music collection and consolidating the existing data is welcome. Also check out some technical information on the XML database at IBM developerWorks."
Now if only they would allow you to upload play lists, and classify your Mp3's =)
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A friend of mine wanted to open up a punk CD store on the web. Being the nice friend I am I helped him import a large amount of data from the CDDB into his OScommerce store (Os commerces is an open source store package, pretty cool)
After much alignment of tables, farting around with the data eventually we got it right but with one small detail left out....
We didn't have cover art images...
So frantically he tried copying the images from other sites, then he kept insisting there was a way I could easily parse the obsfucicated data from other stores (album art gif's are never the same name as the album)
So eventually he gave up on it, but it got me to thinking, would the cover art be something unlawful for a CDDB type of entity to host?
slashdot is the only site you can access, and you failed to get first post?
I wonder if this is with or without the support of our friends at the RIAA. I mean after all, the data being stored may violate copyright laws... a list of songs on a CD, maybe some sample lyrics, all without the approval of the goons in the RIAA.
It's probably a non issue, then again the RIAA has a record of making big issues out of non-issues. It will be interesting to see if anything will happen.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
I find the idea of a program that can identify my MP3s by audio fingerprint, and will submit that information to somewhere on the Internet a little creepy...
Anyone else notice they're being hosted by CCCP? Seriously, they could've chosen a better moniker...
Same here, and about half the images on /. aren't loading.
I'm on ATT cable, fyi.
http://musicbrainz.org/ had to close their site only after one day of operation. They suffered a severe dos-attack known in the computer geek underground as "slashdotting". Goverment officials are very disturbed about this and action are beeing takeing to find the source of this attacks!
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
All your website belong to us!
I had brought up to my friends several times, how it would be great to start something similiar. The metaratings are a great idea, providing the database openly to the public is great, and i'm falling in love with their tagging utility.
And it's all non-profit! (and will likely get better each and every day now that it has all this slashdot traffic)
I am this close to posting the 28 meg mysql database on my school account, but I think the coe admins would kill me!!
hooray! it's a sex wiki
Some AC says to tag and log and we're expected to jump and go? Isn't that how chain letters get started? ....c'mon...
Does "illeagle" mean un-American? I've always wondered. The "ill" seems to be a negative, and the "eagle" part must be refering to our national bird, the symbol of our nation.
than open source music is a simple way of getting samples put onto vinyl. Ive seen so called "computer dj" programs and its still nothing close to cutting on real vinyl.
Though I do like the idea of freeing up music, beats, samples etc, with out a good medium to manipulate the audio this is less of an achievement than it seems.
The reason I say this is because Im a skrxtch dj so this problem of manipulating the audio affects me much more than someone who's mostly doing music on the computer [various forms of electronica]
Another interesting point is that that most skrxtch records encourage reusing the samples and beats. In fact I have a copy of Tales from the Crate next to me that on the cover reads "Unauthorized Duplication is prohibited. Unauthorized flipping, mixing and juggling is recommeneded" [Thats an approximation, I couldnt find the sleeve]
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
The sound you hear is from an mp3 with the sound of a server dying.
This is a great idea, I think, and I'm .. attempting.. to use it right now. But the servers seem to be clogged up and completely useless.
Um.
how does this differ from freedb?
A system that doesn't allow anonymous (unsigned) files to be shared... enforcing user accountability and ensuring all content is in fact freely redistributable (if not, you know who to go after, and you may be able to revoke the user's account, making all files signed by him unshareable)
The RIAA _claim_ sharing their content hurts the bottom line, but imagine the damage caused when people learn they can find their own legal music and don't have to settle on RIAA-dictated tastes.
Google cache of MusicBrainz.org
One of the MusicBrainz developers here.
It seems our provider cannot handle the bandwidth requirements for the Slashdot effect. We are very sorry about that. Please come back tomorrow if you like out project.
Our dual 1.2GHz Linux server is doing OK:
Greetings,
J.
Anyone working on a UNIX port of the tagger utility? The code doesn't look that bad, but's there are a couple of things that I can't figure out. What's vcl.h? Is that a windows thing? What is it for?
(Insert the usual IANAL disclaimer here).
This sounds like a reasonable assumption at first, but if you look at it more closely, on which legal basis could Amazon.com prevent you from using these images? They are not the copyright holders of the art. All they did was a simple scan/resize/save_for_web...
Amazon could overlay a "www.amazon.com" on the scans to make the reuse more annoying, but then they could face suits from the artists...
Now the artists could prevent you from using their art. But if you are not defaming them, I don't see why they would. I think they will rather appreciate the publicity.
I code, therefore I am.
The MusicBrainz Tagger application allows you to automatically look up the tracks in your music collection and then write clean metadata tags (ID3 tags or Vorbis comment fields) to your files. As you tag the files in your collection that MusicBrainz didn't recognize, you submit the acoustic fingerprints (TRM ids) of your files back to the server. Submitting acoustic fingerprints will allow MusicBrainz to automatically identify these tracks in the future, so that other people using the Tagger can benefit from the work you have done.
This sounds really nice, but it works only on Windows ! The code being GPL, I hope it will soon be ported to other free OSes.
Or does anybody know such a tool working under Linux ?
theefer
No, you've misunderstood him. He's only interested in peace for bits of Yorkshire...
I think you have the wrong end of the stick. Musicbrainz isn't a P2P client. It's a database of information on tracks and albums, and libraries for using it.
You are in college... but can't read? *WOW* That's something.
You don't trade files. You upload the track listing and track fingerprints.
Musicbrainz may have been officially launced today, but the project has been around for quite some time already.
I looked at this project about 8 months ago and planned to use this setup for an open source media utility.
:
I stopped short at that time because
1) the TRM (song fingerprint) technology was owned by a seperate entity and was closed/private.
*Paranoid pondering* what if the TRM tech owners decided to charge for future use after the database was largely used and accepted. Although the database would remain open, they could charge for new fingerprints (song IDs). Not neccessarily a bad thing but we've all seen things how f'd up these situations can get.
2) the TRM generation took place on the server. Doing a batch of fingerprints would tie up a connection for quite a while.
My brainz a bit fuzzy on this but I think a portion of the actual audio data is uploaded and then processed on the server. I figured that generating TRMs completely client side and then uploading/matching song data to the server would do better for scalability.
Just the same I haven't looked a the project recently and it may have since changed.
Regardless I think its a pretty cool idea.
The music isn't for everyone but Furthurnet already has such a service. Also, for the shorten compressed files, they can be verified by a central database found here.
I find the programs that interface with musicbrainz to be very useful. The organizational view used by Zinf is probably superior to any other I have used, including iTunes and MusicMatch jukebox. It is great that we have this large database of data that can be accessed from client programs using an open api.
well, i'd be downloading the client, but the FTP server is saying that it's 10 spots are all full right now at 5AM.
c'mon now, this is Slashdot! Open 400,000 users on your FTP server, pay for all the bandwidth yourself, go bankrupt, then post your project on sourceforge =]
Yeah, it's about time there were alternatives to all that overpriced commercial music.
Let's create free, open-source versions of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys!
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. - Will Duran
A system is needed to be able to allow users to provide feedback (and hence publicity to new music) and most importantly somehow give the artists some money for the work they produce, afterall they need to eat too.
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
...is have it store a list of emotions associated with the songs, eg romantic, depressing, happy and so on. You could then build a playlist for whatever mood you were in, or mood you wanted to be in. This is FAR more effective than simply categorising music by genre (in my experience anyway).
I think there is a windows program called Moodlogic that did this but it was closed source, expensive, and it used a proprietery database. It also used the accoustic properties of the song, so it could identify badly-named mp3s.
A system that doesn't allow anonymous (unsigned) files to be shared.
And why should you be obliged to sign your own creation, or public domain one ?
How do you sign ? Is it free ?
When you can sign pubdom, what prevent you to sign unfree ?
I've been wanting to start something similar to this so that musicians and songwriters could collaborate on songs online and share riffs, lyrics, and chord progressions under an open license (letting people freely sample each others creative work as long as their finished product was also "open sourced"). I can't wait to look into this further! This is a great thing indeed.
Sound waves should be free!
are some kind of fascist? or just a wimp typing some shit into a computer?
Hey, our web server running e-smith [e-smith.org] (a modified version of redhat) has just been hacked. See http://www.hybridvision.net does anyone here know of these people, or any previous exploits?
blackmerlin
blackmerlin
...the .mp3 wars of '00, MusicBrainz has been around a long time, and their 'trm' tech was apparently the stuff used by emusic to stick it to Napster:
cf. slashdot and wired.
Lists of songs on CDs and lists of CDs by artists, like any collection of facts, are not copyrightable information.
song lyrics and album cover art, on the other hand, are copyright, being creative works. i don't think MusicBrainz stores either of these things.
Presumably it would be free. gpg is free, so it shouldn't be hard to make a free version. The goal is that if I put a piece of music up and sign it, anyone can share it, if someone (RIAA) accuses them of sharing illegally, that person just points to me "He said I could do this legally". Since the music is signed it is easy to prove that I gave that permission, and the RIAA takes me to court. Of course since I own the copyright they have no ground to sue me.
The difficulty is if I would make a new key, giving my name is Britney Spears, and sign some Britney Spears music, and upload it all at a public terminal. They then have no way to trace who the music is from, but it is on the network, so the RIAA gets to shut down your network just because someone used it against your policy.
On the bad side, some RIAA goon could try to use this for nefarious purposes. On the good side...we could use it to support tipping. The big problem with voluntary tips for unsigned artists is verifying that you're tipping the right people.
Is this service compatible with FLAC? I'm considering biting the bullet and FLACing all my CDs. It would be nice if both the FLAC files and the MP3s I rip from FLAC would be tagged using this service.
I think it's more for music that artists are willing to put in the public domain. Free Music, kinda like Free Software.
GNU/Megadeth!
GNU/Metallica!
GNU/Anthrax!
Please, MusicBrainz people, develop a linux version of your 'tagger' software.
Is the musicbrainz site slow or my network connection is bad? I have a high speed connection and its taking almost 2 minutes to get to every page!
I'd like to have a look at her source code!
Random is the New Order.
So if I use MusicBrainz to tag my music files... won't MusicBrainz then have a list of all my files aong with my IP address? What if the RIAA or some other entity demands to see the list?
Someone mentioned that this technology helped the music industry in its lawsuit against Napster (or another service?), showing which files were being swapped. I haven't been able to quickly find that post again, so here's my thoughts in the void.
Would technology that allows fingerprinting down to the file level, in conjunction with a user-supported (i.e. richly populated) database, actually help music file swapping? Conceivably, someone could integrate this into their service to indicate that a file was what it was called before it was transferred.
Granted, there are other ways to fake a file than just giving the "right" name to a bogus file of the right size. But I imagine something like this (along with checks) could make it much more difficult to kill PNP by populating services with bogus files.
A half-baked idea, but my two cents' worth anyway.
Credit where credit's due: post #5286740 is the one that jogged my brain. Right after I made my own post, I found it lurking around the bottom of the list here along with mine.
I started my own intranet movie database. The problem is that populating it takes so much time, even with the helper apps I made. I really wish someone with the server resources would allow developers to work on a movie database similar to CDDB. The benefit of it would be that people would be able to import data (title, description, rating, length, actors, etc) via XML/etc to use to populate an offline database of movies they own. This personal database could be used to do custom searches on movies the person owns. Imagine having guests stop over for movie night, hand them a wireless PDA or wireless keyboard to media PC (widescreen) for movie selection; they search by a theme, "Camping" and get two results, one of which you end up pulling off your shelf to watch with them.
I did a quick query for the artist Tosca (aka Richard Dorfmeister of Kruder and Dorfmeister) who is big in the downtempo music scene and it only turned up one of his full albums, one remix disc, and a compilation he has a track on. AllMusicGuide has nine discs by him in their db, most with well-written (albeit characteristically glowing) reviews, and an in-depth artist bio. CDDB had them all too.
Photographs are protected by copyright.
Typically the labels only have limited rights themselves with respect to the cover art. Specifically, they usually only have the right to use the cover art when selling or promoting the album. Third parties, having no contract or license from the photographer, will not have any right to exploit the artwork. In fact, if someone uses the artwork in a way that generates money (including ad revenue), they should not be surprised if the photographer (or other album art copyright holder) goes after them and their earnings. Granted, I haven't heard of this happening before...
How so? They are well formed xml documents, have their own xml namespace and begin with the line
?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?
So while all xml is not rdf, all rdf is xml.
220 ProFTPD 1.2.5 Server (ProFTPD Default Installation)[zim.musicbrainz.org]
530 Sorry, the maximum number of allowed clients(10)already connected.
They're not going to get very far at this rate..
Does FreeDB weed out burnt/bogus/etc CDs, unlike the CDDB? I'm thinking you could check newly signed submissions against a sufficiently large and clean database of track listings, it would make it easier to identify the majority of copyrighted music.
--
est modus in rebus
What is to prevent this from turning into another CDDB? What is to prevent MusicBrainz from deciding to close their DB and start charging for use after they've milked the community to build the DB?
The DB implementation may be open source but without the information in it, the implementation is useless.
this sounds an interesting project and i intend to read more about it
- however, on first viewing the website, my very first impression is that they have one of the worst logos i have ever seen
to put it bluntly,
it looks like a pile of shit
with 3 or 4 flies buzzing around it
even when you work out that the picture is meant to represent a brain with musical notes hovering around it, it still looks really dumb
now, on to read about what sounds like a valuable project
just riffing off yr spelling of illegal...
have the illegal actions of the u.s. of a. in militarily and covertly attacking and destabilising many, many nations throughout the world over the last 50 years, finally caught up with this world class bully, which is increasingly resembling an old ill eagle?
This is nice, but what I'd really like to see is a combination of Freedb and the eyesore database, only for any album. I'd like to see, for example, who the drummer was on the song I'm listening to, and what other stuff s/he's done.
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.
So this project is looking to be the next step in CDDB - carrying not only CD info but MP3 files as well?
How about a merger with discogs.com that already have a user-maintained database, with comments et al.
From [LOCArecords.com] :
"LOCA believes that the fight over Open Content and Open Media is a struggle over the freedom of expression and the freedom of speech, radically opening up the possibilities of media. To this end LOCA is attempting to release music under so-called copyleft, a license that enables music writers to develop music collaboratively and equitably and then release it into the public domain. Using either the Open Audio license (from EFF) or the LOCA Public License, a derivative of the GNU Public License (GPL), LOCA hopes to provide the control necessary to prevent further commercialisation of work that is released and to encourage others to do the same. We hope that musicians who contemplate using the work released in this manner will honour the license and release their work under a public license resulting in a radical rejection of the whole capitalist ethos of these multinational media corporations."
This is the first I've heard of a music GNU. Is it new?
A sense of desolation and uncertainty, of futility, of the baselessness
of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavor, and a thirst for a life giving
water which seems suddenly to have failed, are the signs in conciousness
of this necessary reorganization of our lives.
It is difficult to believe that this state of mind can be produced by the
recognition of such facts as that unsupported stones always fall to the
ground.
-- J.W.N. Sullivan
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