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Open Content Music Database Launched

Posted by Hemos on from the using-the-system dept.

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."

5 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. 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...

  2. 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.

  3. 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
  4. 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.