I remember reading about MusicBrainz forever ago but I’ve really started using it in earnest today and it’s totally blowing me away. Running a little slow though, this might be the application that gets me to upgrade my computer. Why don’t these guys have every music site and VCs pounding down their door? Fantastic, moderated metadata plus collection management? That’s hot.
I tried running the iEatBrainz plugin on some of my badly/wrongly tagged mp3s and while it did work it also seemed to crawl really badly on the PB, I put it down to a lack of ram cos im still on 256Mb.
Found it when looking at Audioscrobbler, they do a plugin that cataloges what music you listen to and then gives you more recommendations based on your listening habits, very cool system.
They started off as an open-source competitor to CDDB; they’re trying to turn into a non-profit. The data is under a CC by-nc-sa license.
They do sell commercial licenses; however, that’s the reason VCs wouldn’t be interested.
This thing is sweet – thanks for pointing it out. 😀
“That’s hot”
Have you been watching re-runs of the simple life?
MusicBrainz saved my life. Err .. maybe not, but it still kicks booty. MusicBrainz is (and has been for a year+) a critical part of my MP3 ripping process.
When you have a complete CD worth of MP3 files, Tag & Rename‘s Amazon search feature works even better than MusicBrainz.
@Basil Crow: Thanks for pointing that out. Just tried it and it works perfectly 😀 Way better than the stuff i tried before.
@Matt: The app looks good but it doesn’t find most of the stuff i listen to 😉
Oddly enough, I was just using MusicBrainz yesterday and it was having some trouble talking to FreeDB. I guess a couple of the freedb servers were down… That certainly slowed down my progress.
Yup, MB is standard issue ordinance in my music arsenal. I’m a nitpicking moderator on the site as well.
Basil, I’ll check that out, it’s been having trouble with some of my classical stuff. I love the idea of submitting everything back to the shared infobase though.
@kitten: it doesnt have your music? add it. sure it takes a little while, but giving back helps others in the future. (and possibly yourself, if you have to rip & re-tag, ever)
MusicBrainz is great, and I do use it occasionally. While it’s a good community, I have only three gripes:
1. I often get a “TRM Collision” on a lot of files.
2. Like FreeDB in general, there isn’t a strong consistency in punctuation and capitalization, or between songs in the same CD.
3. It doesn’t put in album art.
Although Tag and Rename isn’t as good for single songs (since you’d have to find them one by one, instead of automatically), I find that its final result is great for complete CDs. When I point it to a folder full of MP3s and use the Amazon search feature, it writes the tags for every song in the CD, the CD’s album info/artist/genre/publisher, and even album art. As far as I’m concerned, it’s perfect for adding to my library then..
Essentially, I use MusicBrainz for batch processing of singles, and Tag&Rename for fine processing of complete CDs. But both are definitely cool. I hope for two things: that MusicBrainz contiues to improve as it already has, and that someone makes a Mac program like Tag&Rename! 🙂
I’m slightly confused by this, why would you need this? The only situation I can think of is if all your mp3’s mysteriously lost all their meta-data tags. I speak as someone who has had mp3’s on various computers for five or six years now and has transferred most of them across computers at least three times. I really can’t see a need for it, so someone explain what I’m missing out on?
Brandon, I added quite a lot yesterday. Thanks for the note 😉
Sparticus: many of my mp3’s haven’t been acquired from ‘clean’ channels, so most have very little beyond track title and artist name..
Ahh, now that makes sense. I thought that might be it, but I figured surely people can’t have that many? Obviously not.