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MusicBrainz

MusicBrainz homepage. The MusicBrainz homepage.
URL	MusicBrainz.org
Commercial?	No; PD/CC-BY-NC-SA licensed
Type of site	Online music encyclopedia
Registration	Required for editing data
Owner	MetaBrainz Foundation
Created by	Robert Kaye
Alexa rank	34,136 (June 2012[update])[1]

MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open content music database. Similar to the freedb project, it was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the CDDB. However, MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become a structured open online database for music.^[2]

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 additionally store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, an acoustic fingerprint for each track and have an optional free-form text field or annotation attached to them. As of 19 April 2012 (2012 -04-19)^[update], MusicBrainz contained information about 660,000 artists, 1 million releases, and 11 million recordings.^[3]

End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.

Fingerprinting[link]

MusicBrainz initially used Relatable's patented TRM (a recursive acronym for TRM Recognizes Music) for acoustic fingerprint matching. This feature attracted a lot of users and allowed the database to grow at a fast rate. By 2005 it became obvious Relatable's fingerprinting solution didn't scale well to the millions of tracks in the database and the search for a viable replacement began.

On May 12, 2006, Robert Kaye posted an announcement on the project's official blog about a partnership between MusicBrainz and MusicIP.^[4] Part of the agreement allows MusicBrainz to use MusicIP's MusicDNS service for acoustic fingerprinting (PUIDs). Since November 24, 2008 TRMs have been phased out and MusicBrainz rely solely on PUIDs. MusicBrainz uses RDF/XML for describing music metadata, which is available for automated processing via HTTP GET and POST methods according to REST architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems.

In 2011 MusicDns was purchased by Gracenote and the service to be closed down over time, so MusicBrainz have started phasing it out in favour of the open source AcoustID.^[5]

Licensing[link]

MusicBrainz's core data (artists, recordings, releases, and so on) is in the public domain, and additional content including moderation data (essentially every original content contributed by users and its elaborations) is placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license.^[6] The relational database management system is PostgreSQL. The server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products.

In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye.^[7]

On 20 January 2006, it was announced that the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data is the Barcelona, Spain based Linkara in their Linkara Música service.^[8]

On 28 June 2007, it was announced that BBC has licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music web pages. The BBC online music editors will also join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database.^[9] On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.^[10]

Client software[link]

• Amarok: KDE audio player
• Banshee: GNOME audio player
• Clementine: multi-platform audio player
• CDex: Microsoft Windows CD ripper
• iEatBrainz: Mac OS X deprecated tag editor
• Jaikoz: Java mass tag editor
• Max: Mac OS X CD ripper and audio transcoder
• Mp3tag: Windows metadata editor and music organizer
• MusicBrainz Picard: cross-platform album-oriented tag editor
• MusicBrainz Tagger: deprecated Microsoft Windows tag editor
• Sound Juicer: GNOME CD ripper

Additionally, freedb clients can access MusicBrainz data through the freedb protocol by using the MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway (mb2freedb) service.

See also[link]

• List of online music databases
• Tunatic

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: MusicBrainz

• Official website

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (October 2012)

Jamillah Knowles
Knowles in July 2010
Born	Australia
Other names	Jemimah Knight
Occupation	Journalist Writer Broadcaster
Employer	The Next Web
Website
jemimahknight.wordpress.com

	Jamillah Knowles's voice recorded November 2012
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Jamillah Knowles, who also works under the name Jemimah Knight,^[1] is a journalist, writer and broadcaster, best known as the producer and presenter of BBC Radio 5 Live's Outriders.^[2]

Jamillah's journalistic career started in 1993 when she trained as a photographer, sub-editor and feature writer working with Trinity Mirror. She joined the BBC as a producer in 2001.

At the BBC she has reported on global matters for The World Today, Outlook and Radio 5 Live programmes. She has frequently written for BBC News online and has worked in the main UK Newsroom, on user-generated content^[3] and social media accounts.

Outriders, formerly known as Pods and Blogs, covers news and views of the people involved at the frontiers of technology and the web. The show also champions the progress of hackers and makers throughout the world. Notable celebrity guests have included Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Kelly, Tim Berners Lee and William Gibson. Since taking on the show, Knowles has presented Outriders from the UK, Nepal, India and the United States.

In March 2012, Jamillah left her news gathering position with the BBC and took up the post of UK Editor with The Next Web,^[4] one of the largest publications delivering an international perspective on the latest news about Internet technology, business and culture.

From from July 2011 - August 2012 she hosted and produced podcasts for Global Voices Online,^[5] which brings together reports from citizen journalists and bloggers everywhere.

She hails from Victoria, Australia and currently lives in London, UK.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Blog
• Jamillah Knowles on Twitter
• Archive of Outriders podcasts