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 MusicBrainz homepage | |
Type of site | Online music encyclopedia[1] |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | MetaBrainz Foundation |
| Created by | Robert Kaye |
| URL | musicbrainz |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional (required for editing data) |
| Users | Over 2 million registered accounts |
| Launched | July 17, 2000[2] |
| Current status | Online |
Content license | Part Creative Commons Zero (open data) and part CC BY-NC-SA (not open); commercial licensing available |
| Written in | Perl with PostgreSQL database |
MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata (this is information about the performers, artists, songwriters, etc.) storehouse to become a structured online database for music.[3][4]
MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and the length of each track. These entries are maintained by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can also store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata. As of November 2024[update], MusicBrainz contains information on over 2.4 million artists, 4.4 million releases, and 33.6 million recordings.[5] End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as ALAC, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.
- ^ "About". MusicBrainz. MetaBrainz. Archived from the original on 2015-05-08. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
- ^ "WHOIS Lookup". ICANN. Archived from the original on 2015-04-02. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- ^ Highfield, Ashley. "Keynote speech given at IEA Future Of Broadcasting Conference Archived 2008-04-22 at the Wayback Machine", BBC Press Office, 2007-06-27. Retrieved on 2008-02-11.
- ^ Swartz, A. (2002). "MusicBrainz: A semantic Web service" (PDF). IEEE Intelligent Systems. 17: 76–77. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.380.9338. doi:10.1109/5254.988466. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2015-04-03. Retrieved 2015-08-28.
- ^ "Database Statistics". MusicBrainz. Retrieved 2023-10-10.