Open Content Music Database Launched

An anonymous reader writes "The open source music database MusicBrainz was launched officially today. The data is partly in the public domain, partly under an open content like license. It includes artist/album/track information, with more to come. There's support for CDDB-like CD identification (actually, a lot of the current data was imported from freedb), but also identification of single tracks via audio fingerprints (TRMs). Help both in adding new content by tagging your music collection and consolidating the existing data is welcome. Also check out some technical information on the XML database at IBM developerWorks."

Re:What will the RIAA think?!?

[1in10]

I don't think you can copyright the list of songs on a cd, since that's a fact and you cant copyright facts.

Re:Is CD cover art illeagle?

[gnurb]

You can get a 300x300 pixel jpg cover art image, at amazon with their webservices [amazon.com]

example image [amazon.com]

Re:Is CD cover art illeagle?

[$$$$$exyGal]

It's pretty easy to get all the cover art from Amazon.com, if you have the ASIN numbers.

As far as the legality, as long as you are selling the items for Amazon.com, then you can use the images. Other than that, I doubt it ;-).

--sex [slashdot.org]

Slashdot effect...

[pouwelse]

Hello,

Google cache of MusicBrainz.org [216.239.53.100]

One of the MusicBrainz developers here.
It seems our provider cannot handle the bandwidth requirements for the Slashdot effect. We are very sorry about that. Please come back tomorrow if you like out project.

Our dual 1.2GHz Linux server is doing OK:

1:39am up 178 days, 8:42, 2 users, load average: 0.04, 0.11, 0.20

146 processes: 145 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states: 3.0% user, 11.0% system, 0.0% nice, 85.0% idle
CPU1 states: 3.0% user, 0.1% system, 0.0% nice, 95.0% idle
Mem: 1551632K av, 1467548K used, 84084K free, 0K shrd, 69944K buff
Swap: 2096472K av, 491708K used, 1604764K free 994652K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
17639 pouwelse 16 0 1076 1076 828 R 11.3 0.0 0:00 top
17267 nobody 9 0 18976 18M 12188 S 2.6 1.2 0:00 httpd
17256 nobody 9 0 20032 19M 12000 S 1.7 1.2 0:01 httpd
17271 nobody 9 0 20204 19M 11824 S 1.7 1.3 0:01 httpd
17245 nobody 9 0 18584 18M 12536 S 0.8 1.1 0:01 httpd
1 root 8 0 468 428 416 S 0.0 0.0 1:33 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd

Greetings,
J.

Re:Is CD cover art illeagle?

[Duds]

The RIAA has been actively threatening sites that carry high res album art. Several of them have closed.

Whether it's actually illegal or people without time/money to fight I don't know.

Tagger win-only ?

[theefer]

The MusicBrainz Tagger application allows you to automatically look up the tracks in your music collection and then write clean metadata tags (ID3 tags or Vorbis comment fields) to your files. As you tag the files in your collection that MusicBrainz didn't recognize, you submit the acoustic fingerprints (TRM ids) of your files back to the server. Submitting acoustic fingerprints will allow MusicBrainz to automatically identify these tracks in the future, so that other people using the Tagger can benefit from the work you have done.
This sounds really nice, but it works only on Windows ! The code being GPL, I hope it will soon be ported to other free OSes.

Or does anybody know such a tool working under Linux ?

Re:Imagine an all-legal file sharing P2P network..

[hackstraw]

The music isn't for everyone but Furthurnet [furthurnet.com] already has such a service. Also, for the shorten compressed files, they can be verified by a central database found here [etree.org].

lest we forget...

[big.ears]

...the .mp3 wars of '00, MusicBrainz has been around a long time, and their 'trm' tech was apparently the stuff used by emusic to stick it to Napster:
cf. slashdot [slashdot.org] and wired [wired.com].

Not all it's cracked up to be

[CainX]

I did a quick query for the artist Tosca (aka Richard Dorfmeister of Kruder and Dorfmeister) who is big in the downtempo music scene and it only turned up one of his full albums, one remix disc, and a compilation he has a track on. AllMusicGuide has nine discs by him in their db, most with well-written (albeit characteristically glowing) reviews, and an in-depth artist bio. CDDB had them all too.

Re:Is CD cover art illegal?

[no_opinion]

Photographs are protected by copyright.

Typically the labels only have limited rights themselves with respect to the cover art. Specifically, they usually only have the right to use the cover art when selling or promoting the album. Third parties, having no contract or license from the photographer, will not have any right to exploit the artwork. In fact, if someone uses the artwork in a way that generates money (including ad revenue), they should not be surprised if the photographer (or other album art copyright holder) goes after them and their earnings. Granted, I haven't heard of this happening before...

Re:linux client?

[Grotus]

Check out this post [slashdot.org] for someone who has already written one.

Re:questions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gracenote now has a freeware MP3 encoding license with SDK containing the encoder software for people developing rippers. See here [gracenote.com]. If your app is freeware, you don't pay for it, and you don't incur the possible legal liabilities of using an unlicensed MP3 encoder.