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.
My fondest memory of Picard is the time it cheekily rewrote all my Russian music (Rachmaninoff and all that) into actual Russian with their alphabet, and how I never could find any of it after that.
It really is an incredible resource, and Picard is a wonderful app. Very satisfying getting a library properly tagged! Takes a while, but totally worth it. Shoutout to ListenBrainz as well, their scrobbling service: https://listenbrainz.org/
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:
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.
Oh, really cool to see my old code implemented in a different language. There is one other reimplementation, I think in C#, but that's much much more verbose. I wanted to experiment with Zig for a long time, this seems like a good opportunity to get at least familiar with it.
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...
It’s also used by other software. My music player MusicBee (RIP MediaMonkey) and the CD ripper ExactAudioCopy [1] both use MusicBrainz for lookup. I have also occasionally entered albums there myself when the CD was still too new.
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.
The problem with those tv and movie databases are that they’re owned by Roku and you can’t download any data dumps…you’re also relying on the good graces of a corporation that can cut you off whenever it feels like it. That was the case with IMDb and I’m still upset about that :/
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.
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.
I would like to sincerely apologize that the autotagger in beets is so fussy. It asks you a lot of complicated questions, insecurely asking that you verify nearly every assumption it makes. This means importing and correcting the tags for a large library can be an endless, tedious process. I’m sorry for this.
Maybe it will help to think of it as a tradeoff. By carefully examining every album you own, you get to become more familiar with your library, its extent, its variation, and its quirks. People used to spend hours lovingly sorting and resorting their shelves of LPs. In the iTunes age, many of us toss our music into a heap and forget about it. This is great for some people. But there’s value in intimate, complete familiarity with your collection. So instead of a chore, try thinking of correcting tags as quality time with your music collection. That’s what I do.
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)
Is this the same MusicBrainz from the early 2000s? I'm sure it's gotten better, but at the time it completely trashed my music library. It broke my trust in any automatic tagging software for decades. I'm still not over it and if I used a software helper, I will go one album at a time, and validate against another source, and change some things manually along with it.
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".
If you ask yourself in what style something should be entered into MusicBrainz, the following principles apply:
Follow Artist intent.
If no definite proof can be found for the correct spelling/punctuation, the most common version should be used.
Follow the style guidelines.
Interestingly, this is not the case with Japanese artists.[1]
I've viewed/edited/added many Japanese entries on MB, and the names and spellings for them are usually always spelled exactly as they appear on the official release.
I noticed that with the artist names. However, I think that comes partially from the albums themselves if the info is in the inserts. It is one thing I wish picard would do better with artists and aliases. Then give you an option/plugin to pick the one you like. Maybe it does. Havent, touched it in a few years.
[+] [-] stego-tech|1 year ago|reply
Which reminds me, it's about time for the yearly re-scan and re-tag.
[+] [-] doublepg23|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fletchowns|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Helmut10001|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dannyobrien|1 year ago|reply
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/organizing-public-inte...
[+] [-] AndyKelley|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lukaslalinsky|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] exogen|1 year ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] dang|1 year ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] paulcapewell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] naveen99|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jabo|1 year ago|reply
https://songs-search.typesense.org
The dataset has been very helpful to benchmark Typesense across releases. So I'm grateful that it exists!
[+] [-] mmh0000|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Semaphor|1 year ago|reply
[0]: https://getmusicbee.com/
[1]: https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
[+] [-] euroderf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lobochrome|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] timc3|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kinduff|1 year ago|reply
Similar projects are also the TMDB (The Movie Database) and TVDB (Television and Film Database).
[+] [-] heyoni|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Shawnecy|1 year ago|reply
[0] = https://www.omdb.org
[+] [-] pimeys|1 year ago|reply
MusicBrainz/beets/flac/plex is my choice for music and it beats Spotify with the selection and quality.
[+] [-] marc_abonce|1 year ago|reply
https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Development/Summer_of_Code
[+] [-] cdchn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] js4ever|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thirteenfingers|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] camtarn|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dfc|1 year ago|reply
It makes heavy use of MusicBrainz. If you are OCD about your digital music collection it is a must have.
[+] [-] squigz|1 year ago|reply
A bit I've taken to heart from their docs:
I would like to sincerely apologize that the autotagger in beets is so fussy. It asks you a lot of complicated questions, insecurely asking that you verify nearly every assumption it makes. This means importing and correcting the tags for a large library can be an endless, tedious process. I’m sorry for this.
Maybe it will help to think of it as a tradeoff. By carefully examining every album you own, you get to become more familiar with your library, its extent, its variation, and its quirks. People used to spend hours lovingly sorting and resorting their shelves of LPs. In the iTunes age, many of us toss our music into a heap and forget about it. This is great for some people. But there’s value in intimate, complete familiarity with your collection. So instead of a chore, try thinking of correcting tags as quality time with your music collection. That’s what I do.
[+] [-] bbqfog|1 year ago|reply
https://discogs-data-dumps.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/index....
[+] [-] msephton|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AzzyHN|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] al_borland|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jcfrei|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Morizero|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mmh0000|1 year ago|reply
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style[+] [-] Narushia|1 year ago|reply
I've viewed/edited/added many Japanese entries on MB, and the names and spellings for them are usually always spelled exactly as they appear on the official release.
[1] https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Language/Japanese
[+] [-] sumtechguy|1 year ago|reply