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.
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/
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.
Hah! Yeah, I whoopsied on some JP soundtracks a few times in the past as well. While world-ending the first time it happened, now I just view it as a glib, "oh _no_, now I have to relisten to the _whole album_ and figure out which track is which!"
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...
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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It looks like the community immune system is starting to reject these, so it would be best to stop posting your site this way.
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).
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 :/
Dare I invoke the CDDB transition to Gracenote and their kidnapping and subsequent licensing and gatekeeping of a swathe of publically provided data.
Could CDDB and similar have prevented such things with better licenses?
A sibling comment points out Roku ownership. A more similar project might be the Open Media Database[0].
[0] = https://www.omdb.org
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.
Still the only sane way to get id3 tags correct for classical.
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.
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.
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
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".
Arguably... That shouldn't be the case. Their style guide says:
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle
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.
The artist "intent" is often misguided. CD-Text usually is assumed to be CP1252 99% of the time where I frequently see punctuation misused for "style" purposes. My biggest peeve is right single quote being used as a fancy apostrophe when that is an inappropriate substitution.
Yep, and yet I still have had people "correct" my edits
ytmp3 + musicbrainz picard + puddletag = <3
For me, it's: (ytdlp|torrents|weird-russian-media-sharing-sites) + picard + foobar2000 (Linux+WINE) = <3
This is so cool, helped me find a release I didn't know about.
Thanks for sharing
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.
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....
Interested how the terms of use vary between the two? Way back ~20 years ago or more, I entered all my collection into Discogs.
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.