MusicBrainz

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MusicBrainz

The MusicBrainz homepage.
URL	MusicBrainz.org
Commercial?	No; PD/CC-BY-NC-SA licensed
Type of site	Online music encyclopedia
Registration	Required for editing data
Owner	MetaBrainz Foundation
Created by	Robert Kaye
Alexa rank	28,197 (August 2012^[update])^[1]

MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open content music database. Similar to the freedb project, it was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the CDDB. However, MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become a structured open online database for music.^[2]^[3]

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 additionally store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, an acoustic fingerprint for each track and have an optional free-form text field or annotation attached to them. As of 19 April 2013 (2013-04-19)^[update], MusicBrainz contained information about 750,000 artists, 1 million releases, and 12 million recordings.^[4]

End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.

Fingerprinting

Besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz also allows looking up recordings by their acoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, must be used for this.

Proprietary services

In the year 2000, MusicBrainz started using Relatable's patented TRM (a recursive acronym for TRM Recognizes Music) for 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 into the millions. This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP (now AmpliFIND) replacing TRM with MusicDNS.^[5] TRMs were phased out and fully replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008.

AcoustID and Chromaprint

In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired by AmpliFIND.^[6] Some time after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service begun having intermittent problems. Since the future of the free identification service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought.

The Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis for AcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský.^[7] 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 2 minutes of a track, detecting the strength in each of 12 pitch classes, storing these 8 times per second. Additional post-processing is then applied to compress this fingerprint while retaining patterns.^[8] 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.

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Licensing

Since 2003,^[9] MusicBrainz's core data (artists, recordings, releases, and so on) are in the public domain, and additional content, including moderation data (essentially every original content contributed by users and its elaborations), is placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license.^[10] The relational database management system is PostgreSQL. The server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products.

In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye.^[11]

On 20 January 2006, it was announced that the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data is the Barcelona, Spain based Linkara in their Linkara Música service.^[12]

On 28 June 2007 BBC announced that it has licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music Web pages. The BBC online music editors will also join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database.^[13] On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.^[14]^[15]

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