Open Content Music Database Launched 148
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."
SCHWEEEEETTT (Score:2, Interesting)
Is CD cover art illeagle? (Score:4, Interesting)
After much alignment of tables, farting around with the data eventually we got it right but with one small detail left out....
We didn't have cover art images...
So frantically he tried copying the images from other sites, then he kept insisting there was a way I could easily parse the obsfucicated data from other stores (album art gif's are never the same name as the album)
So eventually he gave up on it, but it got me to thinking, would the cover art be something unlawful for a CDDB type of entity to host?
er.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Incredibly well designed project (Score:5, Interesting)
I had brought up to my friends several times, how it would be great to start something similiar. The metaratings are a great idea, providing the database openly to the public is great, and i'm falling in love with their tagging utility.
And it's all non-profit! (and will likely get better each and every day now that it has all this slashdot traffic)
I am this close to posting the 28 meg mysql database on my school account, but I think the coe admins would kill me!!
Re:Is CD cover art illeagle? (Score:1, Interesting)
What I'd like to see more (Score:4, Interesting)
Though I do like the idea of freeing up music, beats, samples etc, with out a good medium to manipulate the audio this is less of an achievement than it seems.
The reason I say this is because Im a skrxtch dj so this problem of manipulating the audio affects me much more than someone who's mostly doing music on the computer [various forms of electronica]
Another interesting point is that that most skrxtch records encourage reusing the samples and beats. In fact I have a copy of Tales from the Crate next to me that on the cover reads "Unauthorized Duplication is prohibited. Unauthorized flipping, mixing and juggling is recommeneded" [Thats an approximation, I couldnt find the sleeve]
Can you protect a scan? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Insert the usual IANAL disclaimer here).
This sounds like a reasonable assumption at first, but if you look at it more closely, on which legal basis could Amazon.com prevent you from using these images? They are not the copyright holders of the art. All they did was a simple scan/resize/save_for_web...
Amazon could overlay a "www.amazon.com" on the scans to make the reuse more annoying, but then they could face suits from the artists...
Now the artists could prevent you from using their art. But if you are not defaming them, I don't see why they would. I think they will rather appreciate the publicity.
questions... (Score:5, Interesting)
I stopped short at that time because
1) the TRM (song fingerprint) technology was owned by a seperate entity and was closed/private.
*Paranoid pondering* what if the TRM tech owners decided to charge for future use after the database was largely used and accepted. Although the database would remain open, they could charge for new fingerprints (song IDs). Not neccessarily a bad thing but we've all seen things how f'd up these situations can get.
2) the TRM generation took place on the server. Doing a batch of fingerprints would tie up a connection for quite a while.
My brainz a bit fuzzy on this but I think a portion of the actual audio data is uploaded and then processed on the server. I figured that generating TRMs completely client side and then uploading/matching song data to the server would do better for scalability.
Just the same I haven't looked a the project recently and it may have since changed.
Regardless I think its a pretty cool idea.
musicbrainz programs (Score:3, Interesting)
Open Source Jukebox (Score:5, Interesting)
A system is needed to be able to allow users to provide feedback (and hence publicity to new music) and most importantly somehow give the artists some money for the work they produce, afterall they need to eat too.
What we really need it to do... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think there is a windows program called Moodlogic that did this but it was closed source, expensive, and it used a proprietery database. It also used the accoustic properties of the song, so it could identify badly-named mp3s.
Re:Imagine an all-legal file sharing P2P network.. (Score:3, Interesting)
And why should you be obliged to sign your own creation, or public domain one ?
How do you sign ? Is it free ?
When you can sign pubdom, what prevent you to sign unfree ?
Re:Can you protect a scan? (Score:2, Interesting)
The copyright holder will probably be the record label more often than not. And since owning the cover art is one of the "value-added" things that make people buy "real" CDs rather than obtaining illegal MP3s, I think they would very much object.
Of course, you could argue that the amazon scans are sufficiently low-res and quality that a colour printout made from them wouldn't look nearly as good as the "real" cover, so this point might not apply.
Re:Is CD cover art illeagle? (Score:1, Interesting)
Hate 'em as much as you like, but it's a nifty and helpful little feature, though still needs tweaking.
Re:Open Source Jukebox (Score:2, Interesting)
We (P2P users) are learning that any centralized service simply won't be able to dodge the legal bullet for very long. While we have yet to design a decentralized service that doesn't suffer from scaling problems, I'm confident that eventually, somebody will -- it's really the only place to go.
The only way a decentralized P2P network could match the ease-of-use of Audiogalaxy is for its clients to use a separate database of track information. This is exactly what MusicBrainz gives us. Music sharing will once again become as easy as browsing artists and albums, selecting a track, and downloading it from another person (or group of people) that has it.
Help for PNP against bogus files? (Score:3, Interesting)
Would technology that allows fingerprinting down to the file level, in conjunction with a user-supported (i.e. richly populated) database, actually help music file swapping? Conceivably, someone could integrate this into their service to indicate that a file was what it was called before it was transferred.
Granted, there are other ways to fake a file than just giving the "right" name to a bogus file of the right size. But I imagine something like this (along with checks) could make it much more difficult to kill PNP by populating services with bogus files.
A half-baked idea, but my two cents' worth anyway.
we need one for movies!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:questions... (Score:1, Interesting)