MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to thefreedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on theCompact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audioCD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CDmetadata (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 the album title, track titles, and the length of each track at a minimum. These entries are maintained by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can also store information about release date and country, the CD ID,cover art,acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata. As of November 2024[update], MusicBrainz contains information on over 2.4 million artists, 4.4 million releases, and 33.6 million recordings.[5] End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to addmetadata tags to their digital media files, such asALAC,FLAC,MP3,Ogg Vorbis orAAC.
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 Archive and 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 anAPI for 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.com and some other online resources, but CAA is now preferred, because it gives the community more control and flexibility for managing the images. In As of November 2024[update], over 5.5 million images are stored in the archive.[8]
In June 2024, MusicBrainz launched the Event Art Archive, another joint venture with the Internet Archive.[9] The project is labeled as "the internet's greatest repository for event art", and as of November 2024[update], contains over 4,000 images.[8]
In addition to collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz also allows users to match recordings by theiracoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, is used to do this.
In 2000, MusicBrainz started usingRelatable's patented TRM (arecursive acronym for TRM Recognizes Music) for acoustic fingerprint matching. The popularity of this feature drew in a large user base into the platform, enabling the database to expand rapidly. By 2005, TRM was experiencing difficulties in handling the sheer volume of data, as the number of tracks stored in the database had surpassed one million. This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP (nowAmpliFIND), replacing TRM with MusicDNS.[10] TRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008.
In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired byAmpliFIND.[11]
Since the future of the free identification service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought. The Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis forAcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský.[12] 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 for each of 12pitch classes, storing these eight times per second. Additional post-processing is then applied to compress the fingerprint while retaining patterns.[13] 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.
In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to theMetaBrainz Foundation, anon-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye.[16] On 20 January 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was theBarcelona, Spain-basedLinkara in their "Linkara Música" service.[17]
On 28 June 2007,BBC announced that it had licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music web pages. TheBBC online music editors would also join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database.[18]
On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.[19][20]
Picard identifiesaudio files andcompact discs by comparing either theirmetadata or theiracoustic fingerprints with records in the database.[21] Audio file metadata (or "tags") are a means of 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.[22]
ListenBrainz is afree and open source project that aims tocrowdsource listening data related to digital music and release it under anopen license.[23] It is aMetaBrainz Foundation project tied to MusicBrainz. It aims to re-implement Last.fm features that were lost following that platform's acquisition by CBS.[24][25]
ListenBrainz takes submissions from various media players and services such asMusic Player Daemon,Spotify, andRhythmbox in the form of listens. ListenBrainz can also importLast.fm andLibre.fm scrobbles in order to build listening history. As listens are released under an open license, ListenBrainz is useful for music research in industry and development research.[26][27][28][29]
^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 February 2024.
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