The MusicBrainz homepage. |
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| 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 | 30,099 (January 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]
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 29 July 2010[update], MusicBrainz contained information about 560,000 artists, 830,000 releases, and 9.8 million tracks.[3]
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.
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MusicBrainz initially used Relatable's patented TRM (a recursive acronym for TRM Recognizes Music) for acoustic fingerprint 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.[4] Part of the agreement allows MusicBrainz to use MusicIP's MusicDNS service for acoustic fingerprinting (PUIDs). Since November 24, 2008 TRMs have been phased out and MusicBrainz rely solely on PUIDs. MusicBrainz uses RDF/XML for describing music metadata, which is available for automated processing via HTTP GET and POST methods according to REST 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.[5]
MusicBrainz's core data (artists, tracks, albums, and so on) is 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.[6] The relational database management system is PostgreSQL. The server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, TunePimp, 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.[7]
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.[8]
On 28 June 2007, it was announced that BBC 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.[9] On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.[10]
Additionally, freedb clients can access MusicBrainz data through the freedb protocol by using the MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway (mb2freedb) service.