MusicBrainz
Encyclopedia
MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open content
Open content
Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software....

 music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 database. Similar to the freedb
Freedb
freedb is a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content is under the GNU General Public License. It was originally based on the now-proprietary CDDB . As of April 24, 2006, the database holds just under 2,000,000 CDs...

 project, it was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the CDDB
CDDB
CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for software applications to look up audio CD information over the Internet. This is performed by a client which calculates a unique disc ID and then queries the database. As a result, the client is able to display the artist name, CD title,...

. However, MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...

 metadata storehouse to become a structured open online database for music.

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
Acoustic fingerprint
An acoustic fingerprint is a condensed digital summary, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database....

 for each track and have an optional free-form text field or annotation attached to them. , MusicBrainz contained information about 560,000 artists, 830,000 releases, and 9.8 million tracks.

End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

, Ogg Vorbis or AAC
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....

.

Fingerprinting

MusicBrainz initially used Relatable's patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

ed TRM (a recursive acronym
Recursive acronym
A recursive acronym is an acronym or initialism that refers to itself in the expression for which it stands...

 for TRM Recognizes Music) for acoustic fingerprint
Acoustic fingerprint
An acoustic fingerprint is a condensed digital summary, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database....

 matching. This feature attracted a lot of users and allowed the database to grow at a fast rate. By 2005 it became obvious Relatable's fingerprinting solution didn't scale well to the millions of tracks in the database and the search for a viable replacement began.

On May 12, 2006, Robert Kaye posted an announcement on the project's official blog about a partnership between MusicBrainz and MusicIP. Part of the agreement allows MusicBrainz to use MusicIP's MusicDNS
MusicDNS
MusicDNS is an acoustic fingerprinting service and a software development kit provided by MusicIP. MusicDNS is used by MusicIP Mixer, MusicBrainz Picard, and Jaikoz. According to MusicIP, the fingerprint database contains over 22 million fingerprints as of August, 2006. MusicDNS has nothing to do...

 service for acoustic fingerprinting (PUID
Portable Unique IDentifier
PUID or Portable Unique IDentifier is a unique identifier used by MusicIP and given by MusicDNS to identify a song.- How it works :To identify songs stored in digital format, an acoustic fingerprint of the song is required. This fingerprint can be generated using the Open Fingerprint Architecture...

s). Since November 24, 2008 TRMs have been phased out and MusicBrainz rely solely on PUIDs. MusicBrainz uses RDF
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

/XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 for describing music metadata, which is available for automated processing via HTTP GET and POST methods according to REST
Representational State Transfer
Representational state transfer is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation...

 architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems.

As MusicIP is proprietary MusicBrainz have since 2011 started phasing it out in favour for the open source AcoustID.

Licensing

MusicBrainz's core data (artists, tracks, albums, and so on) is in the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

, and additional content including moderation data (essentially every original content
Threshold of originality
The threshold of originality is a concept in copyright law that is used to assess whether or not a particular work can be copyrighted. It is used to distinguish works that are sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection from those that are not...

 contributed by users and its elaborations) is placed under the Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...

 CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license.
The relational database management system
Relational database management system
A relational database management system is a database management system that is based on the relational model as introduced by E. F. Codd. Most popular databases currently in use are based on the relational database model....

 is PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...

. The server software is covered by the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

. The MusicBrainz client software library, TunePimp, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License
GNU Lesser General Public License
The GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation . It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License...

, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products.

In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation
MetaBrainz Foundation
The MetaBrainz Foundation is a 501 tax-exempt non-profit based in San Luis Obispo, California, that operates the MusicBrainz project.With the creation of the MetaBrainz Foundation on 2005-04-19, the MusicBrainz project entered its second phase of life...

, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye.

On 20 January 2006, it was announced that the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data is the Barcelona, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

 based Linkara in their Linkara Música service.

On 28 June 2007, it was announced that BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 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. On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.

Client software

  • Amarok: KDE
    KDE
    KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...

     audio player
  • Banshee
    Banshee (music player)
    Banshee is an open-source media player, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon Mono and Gtk#, it uses the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and supports many portable media players,...

    : GNOME
    GNOME
    GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

     audio player
  • Clementine
    Clementine (software)
    Clementine is a cross-platform free and open source music player and library organizer. It is a port of Amarok 1.4 to the Qt 4 framework and the GStreamer multimedia framework. It is available for Unix-like, Windows and Mac OS X...

    : multi-platform audio player
  • CDex
    CDex
    CDex is a CD ripper for Microsoft Windows. It convert tracks on a CD to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis. Released under the GNU General Public License, CDex is free software. , it is the 14th most popular download on SourceForge.net, with over 41 million downloads. It...

    : Microsoft Windows
    Microsoft Windows
    Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

     CD ripper
    CD ripper
    A CD ripper, CD grabber or CD extractor is software that convert tracks on a CD to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis.It rips raw digital audio in CDDA format on a compact disc to a file or other output.- History :...

  • iEatBrainz
    IEatBrainz
    iEatBrainz is a Mac OS X MusicBrainz client, written by Jay Tuley. It performs acoustic fingerprint matching in conjunction with the MusicBrainz database. Designed to work with iTunes, it can fingerprint MP3, AAC files, or any other format playable with QuickTime, and passes metadata information to...

    : Mac OS X
    Mac OS X
    Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

     deprecated tag editor
    Tag editor
    A tag editor is a piece of software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats, rather than the actual file content...

  • Jaikoz
    Jaikoz
    Jaikoz is a Java program used for editing and mass tagging music file tags. Jaikoz generates acoustic fingerprints of your files and looks up the PUID and the existing metadata from the MusicBrainz or Discogs service...

    : Java
    Java (programming language)
    Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

     mass tag editor
  • Max: Mac OS X CD ripper and audio transcode
    Transcode
    Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital data conversion of one encoding to another, such as for movie data files or audio files. This is usually done in cases where a target device does not support the format or has limited storage capacity that mandates a reduced file size, or to convert...

    r
  • Mp3tag
    Mp3tag
    Mp3tag is a freeware metadata editor for many audio file formats. It runs on Microsoft Windows.It includes support for the following audio formats: AAC, FLAC, APE, MP3, MPEG-4 , MPC, OGG, OptimFROG OFR, OFS, SPX, TAK, TTA, WMA, WV-Features:*Batch Tag Editing...

    : Windows metadata editor and music organizer
  • MusicBrainz Picard
    MusicBrainz Picard
    MusicBrainz Picard is a cross-platform MusicBrainz tag editor written in Python. Picard replaced an earlier "Classic" tagger is intended to be the next generation of tagger for MusicBrainz, with a focus on album-oriented tagging and cross platform compatibility.Since version 0.7.0, MusicBrainz...

    : cross-platform album-oriented tag editor
  • MusicBrainz Tagger
    MusicBrainz Tagger
    The MusicBrainz Tagger was the standard Windows MusicBrainz client. It supports the acoustic fingerprinting of MP3, FLAC, Vorbis and WAV audio formats with TRM...

    : deprecated Microsoft Windows tag editor
  • Sound Juicer
    Sound Juicer
    Sound Juicer is an application Front-End to the Cdparanoia CD ripping library. It allows the user to extract audio from compact discs and convert it into audio files that a personal computer or digital audio player can understand and play...

    : GNOME CD ripper


Additionally, freedb
Freedb
freedb is a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content is under the GNU General Public License. It was originally based on the now-proprietary CDDB . As of April 24, 2006, the database holds just under 2,000,000 CDs...

clients can access MusicBrainz data through the freedb protocol by using the MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway (mb2freedb) service.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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