Jump to content

MusicBrainz

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected fromMBA (identifier))
MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz logo since February 2016
MusicBrainz homepage.
MusicBrainz homepage
Type of site
Online music encyclopedia[1]
Available inEnglish
OwnerMetaBrainz Foundation
Created byRobert Kaye
URLmusicbrainz.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional (required for editing data)
UsersOver 2 million registered accounts
LaunchedJuly 17, 2000;23 years ago(2000-07-17)[2]
Current statusOnline
Content license
PartCreative Commons Zero(open data) and partCC BY-NC-SA(not open); commercial licensing available
Written inPerlwithPostgreSQLdatabase

MusicBrainzis aMetaBrainzproject that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to thefreedbproject. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on theCompact Disc Database(CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audioCDinformation on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CDmetadata(this is information about the performers, artists, songwriters, etc.) storehouse to become a structured online database for music.[3][4]

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 October 2023,MusicBrainz contains information on roughly 2.2 million artists, 3.9 million releases, and 30.4 million recordings.[5]End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to addmetadata tagsto their digital media files, such asALAC,FLAC,MP3,Ogg VorbisorAAC.

Cover Art Archive

[edit]
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 betweenInternet Archiveand 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 anAPIfor 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 atAmazon.comand some other online resources, but CAA is now preferred, because it gives the community more control and flexibility for managing the images. As of October 2023,over 4.6 million images exist in the archive.[8]

Fingerprinting

[edit]
Screenshot of MusicBrainz Picard

Besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz also allows looking up recordings by theiracoustic fingerprint.A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, is used to do this.

Proprietary services

[edit]

In 2000, MusicBrainz started usingRelatable'spatented TRM (arecursive acronymfor 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 the millions. This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP (nowAmpliFIND), replacing TRM with MusicDNS.[9]TRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008.

In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired byAmpliFIND.[10]Sometime after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service began having intermittent problems.[citation needed]

AcoustID and Chromaprint

[edit]

Since the future of the free identification service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought. The Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis forAcoustIDidentification 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 12pitch 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

[edit]

Since 2003,[13]MusicBrainz's core data (artists, recordings, releases, and so on) are in thepublic domain,and additional content, including moderation data (essentially everyoriginal contentcontributed by users and its elaborations), is placed under the Creative CommonsCC BY-NC-SA-2.0 license.[14]Therelational database management systemisPostgreSQL.The server software is covered by theGNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz clientsoftware library,libmusicbrainz,is licensed under theGNU Lesser General Public License,which allows use of the code by proprietary software products.

In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to theMetaBrainz Foundation,anon-profitgroup, by its creator Robert Kaye.[15]On 20 January 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was theBarcelona,Spain-basedLinkarain their "Linkara Música" service.[16]

On 28 June 2007,BBCannounced that it had licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music web pages. TheBBC online music editorswould 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]

MusicBrainz Picard

[edit]

MusicBrainz Picard is afree and open-sourcesoftware applicationfor identifying,tagging,and organisingdigital audiorecordings.[20]

Picard identifiesaudio filesandcompact discsby comparing either theirmetadataor theiracoustic fingerprintswith records in the database.[20]Audio file metadata (or "tags" ) are a means for storing information about a recording in the file. When Picard identifies anaudio file,it can add new information to it, such as the recording artist, the album title, therecord label,and the date of release.[21]

ListenBrainz

[edit]
Logo of ListenBrainz

ListenBrainzis afree and open sourceproject that aims tocrowdsourcelistening data from digital music and release it under anopen license.[22]It is aMetaBrainz Foundationproject tied to MusicBrainz. It aims to re-implement Last.fm features that were lost following that platform's acquisition by CBS.[23][24]

ListenBrainz takes submissions from media players and services such asMusic Player Daemon,Spotify,andRhythmboxin the form of listens. ListenBrainz can also importLast.fmandLibre.fmscrobbles in order to build listening history. As listens are released under an open license, ListenBrainz is useful for music research for industry and development purposes.[25][26][27][28]

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^"About".MusicBrainz.MetaBrainz.Archivedfrom the original on 2015-05-08.Retrieved4 May2015.
  2. ^"WHOIS Lookup".ICANN.Archivedfrom the original on 2015-04-02.Retrieved23 March2015.
  3. ^Highfield, Ashley. "Keynote speech given at IEA Future Of Broadcasting ConferenceArchived2008-04-22 at theWayback Machine",BBCPress Office, 2007-06-27. Retrieved on 2008-02-11.
  4. ^Swartz, A.(2002)."MusicBrainz: A semantic Web service"(PDF).IEEE Intelligent Systems.17:76–77.CiteSeerX10.1.1.380.9338.doi:10.1109/5254.988466.Archived(PDF)from the original on 2015-04-03.Retrieved2015-08-28.
  5. ^"Database Statistics".MusicBrainz.Retrieved2023-10-10.
  6. ^Fabian Scherschel (10 October 2012)."MusicBrainz and Internet Archive create cover art database".The H. Archived fromthe originalon 7 December 2013.
  7. ^"MetaBrainz Blog".MetaBrainz Blog.Retrieved2022-08-04.
  8. ^"Database Statistics – Cover Art".MusicBrainz.Retrieved2023-10-10.
  9. ^"New fingerprinting technology available now!"(Press release). MusicBrainz community blog. 2006-03-12.Archivedfrom the original on 2008-08-07.Retrieved2006-08-03.
  10. ^AmpliFIND Music Services: NewsArchived2013-09-21 at theWayback Machine
  11. ^"Introducing Chromaprint – Lukáš Lalinský".Oxygene.sk. 2010-07-24.Archivedfrom the original on 2018-10-10.Retrieved2018-04-10.
  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.S2CID1502596.Retrieved2018-04-10.
  13. ^"MusicBrainz Licenses".Archivedfrom the original on April 13, 2003.Retrieved2015-10-23.
  14. ^MusicBrainz Licenseas of 13-11-2010.
  15. ^Kaye, Robert (2006-03-12)."The MetaBrainz Foundation launches!"(Press release). MusicBrainz community blog.Archivedfrom the original on 2011-05-19.Retrieved2006-08-03.
  16. ^Kaye, Robert (2006-01-20)."Introducing: Linkara Musica".MusicBrainz.Archivedfrom the original on 2008-09-07.Retrieved2006-08-12.
  17. ^Kaye, Robert (2007-06-28)."The BBC partners with MusicBrainz for Music Metadata".MusicBrainz.Archivedfrom the original on 2007-06-30.Retrieved2007-07-10.
  18. ^Shorter, Matthew (2008-07-28)."BBC Music Artist Pages Beta".BBC.Archivedfrom the original on 2009-01-24.Retrieved2009-02-12.
  19. ^MusicBrainz and the BBCArchived2018-02-20 at theWayback Machineas of 2013-03-16
  20. ^abStaff writer(28 July 2011)."MusicBrainz Picard at a Glance".PC World.IDG Consumer & SMB.Retrieved2015-09-14.
  21. ^Lightner, Rob (11 June 2012)."Tag your music files correctly with MusicBrainz Picard".CNET.CBS Interactive.Retrieved2015-09-14.
  22. ^"ListenBrainz Goals".ListenBrainz.Retrieved13 February2021.
  23. ^O'Brien, Danny (3 June 2021)."Organizing in the Public Interest: MusicBrainz".Electronic Frontier Foundation.Retrieved9 December2023.
  24. ^Vigliensoni, Gabriel; Fujinaga, Ichiro (23 October 2017)."The Music Listening Histories Dataset".Proceedings of the 18th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference.Suzhou, China: ISMIR: 96–102.doi:10.5281/zenodo.1417499.Retrieved17 February2024.
  25. ^Singh, Param; Kamlesh, Dutta; Kaye, Robert; Garg, Suyash (2020)."Music Listening History Dataset Curation and Distributed Music Recommendation Engines Using Collaborative Filtering".Proceedings of ICETIT 2019.Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering. Vol. 605. pp. 623–632.doi:10.1007/978-3-030-30577-2_55.ISBN978-3-030-30576-5.S2CID204103568.Retrieved13 February2021.
  26. ^Yadav, Naina; Singh, Anil (December 2020). "Bi-directional Encoder Representation of Transformer model for Sequential Music Recommender System".Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation.pp. 49–53.doi:10.1145/3441501.3441503.ISBN9781450389785.S2CID231628582.Retrieved13 February2021.
  27. ^Schedl, Markus; Knees, Peter; McFee, Brian; Bogdanov, Dmitry (22 November 2021)."Music Recommendation Systems: Techniques, Use Cases, and Challenges".Recommender Systems Handbook.pp. 927–971.doi:10.1007/978-1-0716-2197-4_24.ISBN978-1-0716-2196-7.Retrieved9 December2023.
  28. ^Pocaro, Lorenzo; Gómez, Emilia; Castillo, Carlos (12 July 2023)."Assessing the Impact of Music Recommendation Diversity on Listeners: A Longitudinal Study".ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems.arXiv:2212.00592.doi:10.1145/3608487.S2CID254125611.Retrieved17 February2024.

Further reading

[edit]
[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related toMusicBrainz.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MusicBrainz&oldid=1228356845"