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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."

14 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. What will the RIAA think?!? by trotski · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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"
    1. Re:What will the RIAA think?!? by hackstraw · · Score: 4, Funny

      AFAIK, the RIIA isn't opposed to you having information about the music that you own. They are just against you listening to the music that you own.

  2. er.... by Kalewa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  3. Hehe by EnderWiggin99 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Anyone else notice they're being hosted by CCCP? Seriously, they could've chosen a better moniker...

  4. Incredibly well designed project by gnurb · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I stumbled upon this site earlier today completely by accident. I was trying to find an alternative to the gracenote database for use on my website, since Amazon's XML doesn't provide track listing. I did a search for "free database cd dvd" Found an article on The Register about a year old that mentioned MusicBrainz. Did a search, and baMM! discovered a great project.

    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
    1. Re:Incredibly well designed project by Snoe · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well I WAS indexing all of my mp3s (about 20gigs of albums) using their tagger and it was working very, very well. If something is misidentified it is very easy to spot and remedy.

      Then, about 15 minutes ago I noticed the program was no longer speaking to their servers. Lo and behold, the story was put up on slashdot about 15 minutes ago. Not to sound paranoid or anything but I think this coincidence is a little creepy.

  5. Re:Is CD cover art illeagle? by gnurb · · Score: 5, Informative
    You can get a 300x300 pixel jpg cover art image, at amazon with their webservices

    example image

    --
    hooray! it's a sex wiki
  6. What I'd like to see more by nizcolas · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  7. Imagine an all-legal file sharing P2P network... by lightspawn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Slashdot effect... by pouwelse · · Score: 4, Informative
    Hello,

    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:

    1:39am up 178 days, 8:42, 2 users, load average: 0.04, 0.11, 0.20
    146 processes: 145 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
    CPU0 states: 3.0% user, 11.0% system, 0.0% nice, 85.0% idle
    CPU1 states: 3.0% user, 0.1% system, 0.0% nice, 95.0% idle
    Mem: 1551632K av, 1467548K used, 84084K free, 0K shrd, 69944K buff
    Swap: 2096472K av, 491708K used, 1604764K free 994652K cached

    PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
    17639 pouwelse 16 0 1076 1076 828 R 11.3 0.0 0:00 top
    17267 nobody 9 0 18976 18M 12188 S 2.6 1.2 0:00 httpd
    17256 nobody 9 0 20032 19M 12000 S 1.7 1.2 0:01 httpd
    17271 nobody 9 0 20204 19M 11824 S 1.7 1.3 0:01 httpd
    17245 nobody 9 0 18584 18M 12536 S 0.8 1.1 0:01 httpd
    1 root 8 0 468 428 416 S 0.0 0.0 1:33 init
    2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd

    Greetings,
    J.

  9. Can you protect a scan? by tamnir · · Score: 4, Interesting
    As far as the legality, as long as you are selling the items for Amazon.com, then you can use the images. Other than that, I doubt it ;-).


    (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.
  10. questions... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  11. Open Source Jukebox by locarecords.com · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I am not really sure how useful this will be. We are an Open Source music label LOCA RECORDS releasing tracks onto Vinyl (as well as old fashioned MP3) and the problem is not that of tracknames and tags etc but of distributing the music itself.

    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
  12. lest we forget... by big.ears · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...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.