The Open Music Encyclopedia

MusicBrainz and its software companion, Picard, are absolute blessings when it comes to micromanaging a music library in this day and age. It can't find _everything_ I have due to entire artists appearing and disappearing between the closure of Napster and the creation of YouTube, but it gets me to that 95% CI that puts me at ease and lets me enjoy my collection. The fact it's global instead of regional (like a lot of automated DB lookups that cannot find my JP/ZA/DE/FR/etc albums here in AMER) is also a big notch in its belt.

Which reminds me, it's about time for the yearly re-scan and re-tag.

I wrote about the history of MusicBrainz for the EFF in 2021, as part of a series looking at how "public interest internet" (ie commons-based work) survives outside of the constant coverage and mergers of bigger, more commercial projects:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/organizing-public-inte...

I recently ported [Chromaprint](https://github.com/acoustid/chromaprint/) to Zig. If there's interest I would be happy to extract it into a separately maintained package. For now it lives [here](https://codeberg.org/andrewrk/player/src/branch/main/player/...). I also did a [semi-related talk about this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCLrNqc9jdE).

For context, Acoustid is a MusicBrainz-adjacent service for figuring out the MusicBrainz ID of a song based on the sonic content alone, even if it has been distorted or compressed. Chromaprint is the logic for computing an Acoustid given a song as input.

MusicBrainz is great! Every now and then I'll get an email notification that someone has updated an attribute on some obscure local band that I put on there.

ca. 2017 I undertook the considerable task of building a GraphQL interface to MusicBrainz, to support a side project of mine. This was a great experience for learning the breadth of MusicBrainz and how to design things with GraphQL. Sometimes I look at the documentation generated from the resulting schema and wonder when I ever had that much time: https://github.com/exogen/graphbrainz/blob/master/docs/types...

Related. Others?

MusicBrainz: An open music encyclopedia (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31600800 - June 2022 (15 comments)

Music Library and MusicBrainz Picard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29735626 - Dec 2021 (45 comments)

MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14478515 - June 2017 (90 comments)

If anyone's interested, a while ago I downloaded the MusicBrainz database and built a search-as-you-type experience here with about 32M songs:

https://songs-search.typesense.org

The dataset has been very helpful to benchmark Typesense across releases. So I'm grateful that it exists!

Make sure to checkout Picard:

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Which uses the MusicBrainz DB to auto tag and correct audio file names. Makes it really easy to organize a large collection of (pirated) audio.

Quaint memories of a carefully curated library of music.

iTunes was my pride, every file properly tagged with beautiful music. Spending whole evenings doing nothing but scrolling through my music and listening to gems I had found.

iTunes Match sounded great. After all Apple was dedicated to Music (Liberal Arts & Technology!) and I would finally have the ability to have my *entire* music collection with me on the road.

Hey - iTunes replaced a version of a song (Max Richter On the Nature of Daylight) with a slightly different version (Weird vocalized version from a Leonardo di Caprio Soundtrack) and for some reason even *my* copy on my Mac is now replaced by this one. Lot's of angry e-mails with Support.

They bought Beats by Dr. Dre - a bit odd and that Jimmy Iovine guy starts showing up at WWDC. Odd. He's not so sympa.

So now iTunes becomes Apple Music and you compete with Spotify eh?! Well if you make it just right and don't mess up MY music and combine it with streaming - that could be great! Plus ONLY Apple could pull this off.

Hey, somehow I can't find my Music anymore and some of my demo bootlegs are gone.

Apple Music has disappeared from WWDC, because we all complained that it isn't relevant to developers maybe?! But why doesn't it show up in the iPhone event anymore?

Okay - I give up. Streaming it is. Lost my old collection of digital music. It joins my abandoned tapes and cds.

Spotify is so much better wow! I wish I could integrate it better with iOS. Why does it always loose the now playing screen.

I've been a contributor to the project and I've been using it for years. I love the community effort.

Similar projects are also the TMDB (The Movie Database) and TVDB (Television and Film Database).

Their editor is such a nice thing to use. I add a lot of stuff weekly to MusicBrainz, and especially the media editor where you just paste the tracks somehow parsed, and it will create the media with the track numbers, names, lengths and artists. If you do this often enough, you appreciate the efficiency.

MusicBrainz/beets/flac/plex is my choice for music and it beats Spotify with the selection and quality.

By the way, every year MusicBrainz participates in the Google Summer of Code. So, if you qualify, you can get paid for contributing to their codebase.

https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Development/Summer_of_Code

I talked to these guys decades ago when I was working in a similar space and I'm glad to see they're keeping on keeping on.

MusicBrainz is great. I stumbled upon it about a year ago while trying to figure out how various open-source desktop music apps populate track info... and was delighted to find that some random Internet stranger had helpfully catalogued all my youtube videos years prior!

Way back in 2007-2009, a bunch of Amazon Scotland developers and I were tasked to make a ripoff of MusicBrainz, because Amazon wanted another IMDb to sell ads on. (The brief was literally "make us IMDb but in another vertical"!) It felt like a doomed project from the start, and I kinda hated the idea of ripping off an open project and trying to steal their users, but hey, it paid the bills.

We imported the MusicBrainz database, spent months hotly debating about the data model (releases versus editions, mostly), more months preparing the site for an influx of traffic (our goal for launch was 200 hits per second), and yet more months going from a team-internal design (Amazon at that time believed that engineers were perfectly good designers, which I think says a lot about the 2007 Amazon site design!) to an execrable bright-yellow-and-red "tequila sunrise" design by an internal Amazon designer from Seattle, to finally something attractive once we hired our own designer.

Then after two years of hard work we launched and hilariously sunk without trace, except for one dedicated user who we reckoned had a big paper music encyclopedia and who just kept on trucking, adding basic info, for months. We sent her a T-shirt.

SoundUnwound closed quietly a couple of years after launch. MusicBrainz is still here, and for that I'm very glad.

If you want a awesome tool to manage your music collection check out beets: https://beets.io/

It makes heavy use of MusicBrainz. If you are OCD about your digital music collection it is a must have.

MusicBrainz is awesome! If you like this kind of thing, also check out the Discogs data dumps:

https://discogs-data-dumps.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/index....

MusicBrainz (and Picard) are amazing tools. I tag all my music with it, and try and contribute to the database when I can (normally for doujinshi stuff)

Still the only sane way to get id3 tags correct for classical.

I remember using this a very long time ago to update some songs in my iTunes library that were just labelled Track 01, 02 and so on. Felt like magic.

The only issue I have with MusicBrainz is that they generally use correct grammar/spelling/style over what the artist uses themself. For example, "accapella" -> "a cappella" or "Remix" -> "remix".

This is just incredible. I listen to tonnes of old Vaporwave playlists and I've been desperately looking for somewhere to record who-wrote-what who-sampled-whom and so on. Mostly so I could find the original work and check it out.

Used it on and off since the early days, and it is ok. Last time I tried, I hoped to automate the tagging of all my music collection, but I had to give up and revert back to manually edit the tags using mp3tag (https://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html), as there were too many mismatches (either the album were wrong, or the title of the songs for the most part).

Been using, and donating to, MusicBrainz for years now. Highly recommend trying it out!

I'm cobbling together something that includes links to musicbrainz and other encyclopaedia https://ont.fyi/entity/Q15920 just search for your artist (or anything really).

It's very WIP and rough around the edges, but feedback welcome (it is mostly a wikidata wrapper at the moment, but that isn't the intended goal).

This is wonderful. Truly the spirit of the 2000s internet.

I wish designers helped modernize the looks. This needs to be well-used

I have used MusicBrainz Picard to tag my mp3s (yes) for quite some time now.

Minor thingy: it labels an organ as a wind instrument, which is unusual. A piano is labelled string instrument, equally unusual. And it says piano quartet consists of a piano, a violin, a viola and a cello, which is not unusual, but definitely not always the case.

And P.I. Tchaikovsky has different spellings: often it's in Cyrrilic, but it also occurs in Latin. His "end area", a weird term for the place of death, however is consequently called "Sankt-Peterburg".

Don't treat that info as consistent, complete or correct.

This is so cool, helped me find a release I didn't know about.

Thanks for sharing

ytmp3 + musicbrainz picard + puddletag = <3

First time browsing this website, and it seems like an amazing project!

I particularly like that they link to places where you can purchase a song or album. As someone who's considering streaming my music from a local server, those links could come in real handy!

I have struggled with how to get lodged a correction to a CD match which I have in my hands, and which I found digitised track lists for in (of all places) a chinese university music library collection, but which doesn't match the ISBN and other tagging in the musicbrainz DB. It's like they take the "best" match from their US/EU pressings and if you live in asia and have an alternate market and a slightly different combination in the pressing, you're SOL. I am in the asia-pacific. I do have this recording. it does not match what they and discogs have for this CD.

(its a recording of the bach double violin concerto over 2 CDs by Zukerman/Stern/Perlman with other materials, which seem to vary by pressing)

The tooling is great for the mainline. If you have anything on the margins, it can make your collection look very strange. Maybe I missed how the document how to lodge corrections.

Really? I blame the music industry for re-using the barcodes and identity info behind different pressings.

For anyone using Last.fm on iOS, try: https://www.bijou.fm

One of my old bands is listed in here.

Really like them in general and did my best to correctly submit information about media in my collection.

Then everything went bad in an unexpected way. I was using Firefox on a Mac to interact with the site. Apparently they added a bunch of javascipt to the site that would automatically fill some fields that I didn't even understand, but the scripts did not execute correctly or even at all on my system. Later I got an angry message from someone at the site telling me that my submissions were unacceptable, though it isn't clear if some or all data was backed out or what. Given the timing it seems they were targeting IE6 on Windows and could not imagine any other kind of user. They could have somehow checked script function on the incoming data, and apparently eventually did that, but they got angry at me instead even though I put quite a bit of effort into correctness.

Have stayed away since, but still take this as a warning about the kinds of things that can go wrong even with the most well meaning contributed data type site. And unfortunately this kind of music data continues to have relatively low value to most audiences.