In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • MusicBrainz
  • Alisa Rata Stutzbach
MusicBrainz. MetaBrainz Foundation. http://musicbrainz.org (Accessed March 2011). [Requires a Web browser and an Internet connection].

For roughly two decades, compact discs were produced without any metadata to identify the music contained on them, such as artist or track names. This lack of identifying music information gave rise to the Compact Disc Database (CDDB) project, a user-contributed database of information about musical CDs that was created so people could organize their audio collections. Originally designed as a free site, CDDB was sold and became the proprietary software Gracenote (now owned by Sony and widely used by most media players). Amidst the fury over the loss of a database users believed would always be free, open source alternatives such as freedb.org and MusicBrainz began as permanently-free replacements. Since then, MusicBrainz has evolved to incorporate far more metadata beyond that needed to identify a CD.

MusicBrainz is a powerful relational database of music metadata. Collecting large amounts of information beyond the traditional model of artist/album/track, MusicBrainz attempts to provide as thorough a repository of music metadata as is possible. Though it currently falls short of the stated broad aspirations on its homepage of being a “comprehensive music information site” (sometimes compared to Wikipedia), MusicBrainz is a robust source of free music information, particularly of metadata for audio files, when many related products are becoming more and more commercialized and proprietary.

As one of the two remaining open source projects created in direct response to the commercialization of what is now known as Gracenote, MusicBrainz began in 2000 as a private project of Robert Kaye, now executive director of the MetaBrainz Foundation, under which the MusicBrainz project operates on a non-profit basis. Like other CDDB replacements, MusicBrainz began as a site where users could compare and improve audio file metadata by matching and contributing track information to a shared database. However, unlike the flat file database structure of freedb.org, MusicBrainz is structured as a relational database, which has allowed MusicBrainz to expand its scope. Content in the database, as well as all support information and discussion, is available free from the MusicBrainz Web site. Registration—also free—is only required for users wishing to edit MusicBrainz data.

Distributed under the GNU General Public License from the Free Software Foundation, MusicBrainz software products [End Page 147] are open source and explicitly designed to avoid the same fate as CDDB (which many of the original contributing users believed to be open source). Users must agree to a license that allows them to copy the software freely and make their own derivative works, which in turn must preserve the same level of licensing freedom to encourage further creative efforts. The core data of MusicBrainz—i.e., factual information about releases, artists, etc.—is in the public domain, and the remainder of the data is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Though there are many products and services listed on MusicBrainz, only the musicbrainz.org Web site and the Picard tagger—the two free, officially sanctioned, most easily accessible resources for the standard user—will be addressed in detail in this review.

The MusicBrainz Web site

The MusicBrainz database can be searched on its Web site in a variety of ways. A search box is available on all pages of the main site, and allows for keyword searching in a variety of fields, including artists, releases, tracks, labels, and annotations. There is even a search of freedb.org to import (and then ostensibly improve) metadata from that similar database. An Advanced Query search allows virtually any field of metadata to be queried, and there is extensive documentation on the very detailed search capabilities of the search engine used for the site.

Additional search options from the ever-present top banner include searching external but related sites, such as shopping sites (e.g., Amazon, Barnes and Noble), lyrics sites, classical music sites, and other select music information sites. Registered users can also search pending edits to the database in order to vote on their acceptance. There are also browsing options for artists, labels, releases, and available plugins.

The relational...

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