MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the

freedb Freedb was a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculated a hash function from the CD table of contents and used ...

project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata (this is information about the performers, artists, songwriters, etc.) storehouse to become a structured 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 also store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art,

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

, free-form annotation text and other metadata. , MusicBrainz contained information on roughly 2 million artists, 3.3 million releases, and 27.5 million recordings. End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as ALAC, FLAC,

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

Ogg Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

or AAC.

Cover Art Archive

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 between

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

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 an

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

for third parties to use. As with other contributions, the MusicBrainz community is in charge of maintaining and reviewing the data. Until May 16, 2022, cover art was also provided for items on sale at

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econo ...

and some other online resources, but CAA is now preferred because it gives the community more control and flexibility for managing the images. , over 3.7 million images exist in the archive.

Fingerprinting

Besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz also allows looking up recordings by their

. A separate application, such as

MusicBrainz Picard MusicBrainz Picard is a free and open-source software application for identifying, tagging, and organising digital audio recordings. It was developed by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit company that also operates the MusicBrainz databa ...

, must be used for this.

Proprietary services

In 2000, MusicBrainz started using ''Relatable's'' patented TRM (a

recursive acronym A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', in which Hofs ...

for TRM Recognizes Music) for acoustic 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 AmpliFIND is an acoustic fingerprinting service and a software development kit developed by the US company MusicIP. MusicIP first marketed their fingerprinting algorithm and service as MusicDNS. In 2006, MusicIP reported that the MusicDNS database ...

), replacing TRM with MusicDNS. TRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008. In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired by

. Some time after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service began having intermittent problems.

AcoustID and Chromaprint

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 AcoustID is a webservice for the identification of music recordings based on the Chromaprint acoustic fingerprint algorithm. It can identify entire songs but not short snippets. By 2017, the free service had 34 million "fingerprints" in store an ...

identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský. 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 in each of 12

pitch class In music, a pitch class (p.c. or pc) is a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart; for example, the pitch class C consists of the Cs in all octaves. "The pitch class C stands for all possible Cs, in whatever octave positio ...

es, storing these eight times per second. Additional post-processing is then applied to compress this fingerprint while retaining patterns. 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.

Licensing

Since 2003, MusicBrainz's core data (artists, recordings, releases, and so on) are in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

, 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 A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

-2.0 license. The relational database management system is PostgreSQL. The server software is covered by the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

. The MusicBrainz client

software library In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and sub ...

, ''libmusicbrainz'', is licensed under the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products. In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the

MetaBrainz Foundation The MetaBrainz Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit based in San Luis Obispo, California that operates the MusicBrainz MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the f ...

, a

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

group, by its creator Robert Kaye. On 20 January 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was the

Barcelona Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within ci ...

, Spain-based ''Linkara'' in their "Linkara Música" service. On 28 June 2007, BBC announced that it had licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music web pages. The BBC online music editors would 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 is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

audio player *

Banshee A banshee ( ; Modern Irish , from sga, ben síde , "woman of the fairy mound" or "fairy woman") is a female spirit in Irish folklore who heralds the death of a family member, usually by screaming, wailing, shrieking, or keening. Her name i ...

– multi-platform audio player * Beets – automatic

CLI CLI may refer to: Computing * Call Level Interface, an SQL database management API * Command-line interface, of a computer program * Command-line interpreter or command language interpreter; see List of command-line interpreters * CLI (x86 instruc ...

music tagger/organiser for Unix-like systems *

Clementine A clementine (''Citrus × clementina'') is a tangor, a citrus fruit hybrid between a willowleaf mandarin orange ( ''C.'' × ''deliciosa'') and a sweet orange (''C. × sinensis''), named in honor of Clément Rodier, a French missionary who fir ...

– multi-platform audio player *

CDex CDex is a free software package for Digital Audio Extraction from Audio CD (a so-called CD ripper) and audio format conversion for Microsoft Windows. It converts CDDA tracks from a CD to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg ...

– Microsoft Windows

CD ripper A CD ripper, CD grabber, or CD extractor is software that rips raw digital audio in Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) format tracks on a compact disc to standard computer sound files, such as WAV or MP3. A more formal term used for the proc ...

* Demlo – a dynamic and extensible music manager using a CLI *

Exact Audio Copy Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is a CD ripping program for Microsoft Windows. The program has been developed by Andre Wiethoff since 1998. Wiethoff's motivation for creating the program was that other such software only performed jitter correction whil ...

– Microsoft Windows CD ripper * iEatBrainz –

MacOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

X, deprecated * foo_musicbrainz component for foobar2000 – music library/audio Player *

Jaikoz Jaikoz is a Java program used for editing and mass tagging music file tags. Jaikoz generates acoustic fingerprints from music files using the AcoustId service, it can then look up the metadata from MusicBrainz using the AcoustId, additionally ...

–

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

mass tag editor * Max – Mac OS X CD ripper and audio

transcode Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target dev ...

r *

Mp3tag Mp3tag is a metadata tag editor that supports many popular audio file formats. It is freeware for Microsoft Windows, while it costs USD $19.99 for Apple macOS in the Mac App Store. Features * Batch Tag Editing. Write ID3v1.1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4 ...

– Windows metadata editor and music organizer *

– cross-platform album-oriented tag editor * MusicBrainz Tagger – deprecated Microsoft Windows tag editor *

puddletag Puddletag is a graphical audio file metadata editor ("tagger") for Unix-like operating systems. It is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. In most major desktop Linux distributions, ...

– a

tag editor A tag editor (or tagger) is a piece of software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats, rather than the actual file content. These are mainly taggers for common audio tagging formats like ID3, APEv2 tag, APE, and Vorbis comments ...

for

PyQt PyQt is a Python binding of the cross-platform GUI toolkit Qt, implemented as a Python plug-in. PyQt is free software developed by the British firm Riverbank Computing. It is available under similar terms to Qt versions older than 4.5; this m ...

under the

GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

Rhythmbox Rhythmbox is a free and open-source audio player software, tag editor and music organizer for digital audio files on Linux and Unix-like systems. Rhythmbox is designed to work well under GNOME, but can function on other desktop environments. I ...

music player – an audio player for Unix-like systems * Sound Juicer – GNOME CD ripper * Zortam Mp3 Media Studio –

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

music organizer and ID3 tag editor

Freedb Freedb was a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculated a hash function from the CD table of contents and used ...

clients could also access MusicBrainz data through the freedb protocol by using the MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway service, mb2freedb. The gateway was shut down on March 18, 2019.

References

External links

* * – official site
MusicBrainz
info at the

BBC Music BBC Music is responsible for the music played across the BBC. The current director of music is Bob Shennan, who is also the controller of BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 6 Music, and the BBC Asian Network. Officially it is a part of the BBC's Radio ...

site {{DEFAULTSORT:Musicbrainz Acoustic fingerprinting Free-content websites Library 2.0 Library cataloging and classification Metadata registry Multilingual websites Online music and lyrics databases Tag editors that use Qt American online encyclopedias