Maybe you’ve heard of MusicBrainz- maybe you haven’t. I had but didn’t think I needed it and it turns out I was seriously mistaken.
MusicBrainz starts out a lot like CDDB/FreeDB - meaning if you are converting your CD collection to MP3s then you can use it to identify the cd and tag everything. Frankly that’s kind of boring.
The cool part of MusicBrainz is their recognition system. Let’s say that you have a pile of MP3s you ripped at some point but were too lazy to actually tag properly. This can be a big problem to sort out if you have a lot of MP3s like this that are in one big directory - so they are bascially in total disarray.
This is where MusicBrainz comes in. They have access to a special technology that allows them to look at the first few seconds of the song and then compare it to their db and figure out what song it actually is. This isn’t perfect but I can tell you from experience it handled some of my more complicated MP3s pretty well.
You see I subscribe to this magazine called CMJ - which every month they send me a sampler cd of 17-25 tracks with a bunch of artists. It turns out that a lot of times when I ripped them the stupid programs didn’t handle the multi artist disk very well so now they’re all mixed up.
MusicBrainz helped me quickly sort them out - and I found out that I had a bunch of duplicates - mostly because I keep copies of my music collection of a couple of different computers (not to mention the rips I did of part of my cd collection on my old mac which I thought I had lost until this weekend).
So if you find yourself doing some spring cleaning of your music collection - check it out.
June 20th, 2005 at 2:51 pm
I’m a huge fan of MusicBrainz, but the only problem I noticed is that I too had many duplicates (According to musicbrainz) however, while many of them were duplicates, some of them were completely different songs that got misnamed and I almost deleted them. I happened to listen to a bunch before I deleted, but otherwise I was about to just do a sort to find duplicates and wipe out anything with a (1) or (2), etc….
June 20th, 2005 at 4:15 pm
At least you can just sort thru the dupes ;)
Yeah - I actually talked to the one of the founders of the project at OSCON - he said it is a flaw in the system they use that only looks at the first few seconds of a song and thus can be fooled in some cases.
They are currently evaluating a new solution based on all the data they have collected as part of the project.