A nonprofit service that adds meta-data like song-name and artist to digital music has just signed a deal to get access to a better algorithm for figuring out which song is which.
MetaBrainz is a charitable nonprofit that produces MusicBrainz, a free and open alternative to Gracenote’s CDDB data, which is only available on restrictive and cumbersome terms. The Gracenote database was built by volunteers, but the company then fenced off the product of all that volunteer effort and sold it off to the highest bidders.
MusicBrainz’s latest deal with MusicIP gives the charity access to a sophisticated fingerprinting algorithm in exchange for its store of meta-data, making it an even more effective competitor to Gracenote.
This is great news — it brings us one step closer to a world of community ownership of basic, factual information about the cultural goods around us, so that anyone, commercial or free, can produce innovative, valuable services.
Built on the belief that music metadata is public domain information, MusicIP’s Music Digital
Naming ServiceTM (MusicDNS) is a simple, dependable, inexpensive way to identify digital
music tracks and provide basic metadata. Through this partnership, the MusicDNS database of
more than 16 million identified and analyzed tracks will grow significantly in conjunction with
additional metadata information provided by the ongoing efforts of the MusicBrainz community.
In exchange, MusicIP is providing MusicDNS at no cost to MusicBrainz, and for other non-profit
projects that are based on the same core beliefs…MusicBrainz is also supporting MusicIP’s Open FingerprintTM Architecture, which consistently
and rigorously identifies the sounds in an audio file, regardless of variations in the digital-file
details. The Open Fingerprint is designed to work successfully with all of the possible music in
the world, and works seamlessly with MusicDNS to provide identification integrity.“In addition to the sharing of music identification and metadata, MusicIP is proud to be donating
10% of revenue from the delivery of MusicBrainz data via MusicDNS back to the MetaBrainz
Foundation to support their continued efforts.” said Dr. Matthew Dunn, CEO of MusicIP. “Our
partnership with MusicBrainz is our first step into the Open Source community, and we’re proud
to be taking this step with such a respected partner in the industry.”
(Disclosure: I am a proud Director of the MetaBrainz charity)