Today marks the launch of MetaBrainz, a nonprofit 501(c)3 on whose Board of Directors I proudly serve, along with Joi Ito, Larry Lessig and Dan Brickley. MetaBrainz will oversee and fund the work of MusicBrainz, an audio fingerprinting service that can fill in all the MP3s and Oggs in your music library by listening to them and figuring out what they are — this means that if you make a commercial music player, you can opt to use MusicBrainz instead of kissing ass at Gracenote, the for-profit entity that took all the info that music-listeners typed in to make the CDDB and closed it off and started charging monopoly rents on.
Recently, the MusicBrainz project released its much-anticipated Advanced Relationships feature that allows users to contribute detailed information about musical works and artists. These expanded capabilities can capture all of the credits that are typically printed in the liner notes of an audio CD, as well as data found in comprehensive musical biographies or discographies:
"With Advanced Relationships, MusicBrainz expands its data coverage beyond basic metadata and sets its sights on becoming a user contributed music encyclopedia. The project can now capture more information ranging from common knowledge to obscure facts about music. We are finally ready to incorporate the detailed information that users have been clamoring to contribute." said Robert Kaye, the Executive Director of the MetaBrainz Foundation.
