"MusicBrainz is operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a California based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping MusicBrainz free and open source." - the gloriously retro-looking front page
In that sense, the depth and variety of good music that is available has been shrinking for a long while now. The advent of streaming seems to have made it worse.
All of them were available on youtube, even the whitelabel DJ-only releases!
I can do that with iTunes or Spotify or Tidal or Amazon Music or whatever else.
But none of these bookmarks are necessarily related to my music. They are only just bookmarks that refer to music that might exist within the libraries that these bodies provide.
And while all of these libraries are certainly quite vast, there's a fuckton of (published!) music that these commercial libraries do not provide.
Sony was a big supporter of it ~25 years ago.
Good times...
The factory stereo has a recent copy of Gracenote's CDDB built-in.
It also automagically rips and compresses Red Book CDs to to internal storage.
And it is smart enough to play a CD seemingly like regular -- with random track access and such -- while concurrently [and rather quickly] ripping the entire disc.
It's mobilized piracy at the most invisible form.
But yeah: CD Text is/was neat, at least in concept. I never got a chance to use it; none of my audio hardware ever supported it. (Supposedly, it also supported song lyrics.)
The reason other labels, and most cd units, don’t use CD-Text is companies don’t want to pay for the license.
CDDA barely feels like a digital format: Sure, there's PCM audio on them, but error detection is dubious at best – it doesn't cover any sub-channels to my knowledge, and it's done by the same low-level layers as error correction, so I believe there's a chance for mistaking a garbled-but recoverable frame for a broke one.
Not all edits, just major ones (e.g. name changes). Minor edits usually get auto-accepted.
Edit #122458416 - Edit medium Vote tally: 0 yes : 0 no Status: Applied Opened: 2025-02-24 00:02 UTC Closed: 2025-03-03 01:00 UTC For quicker closing: 3 unanimous votes If no votes cast: Accept upon closing
Clicking through to the CD release we can see that it indeed still has those two tracks combined https://musicbrainz.org/release/af4dc096-65d2-4cc5-9e0c-176d...
They got the change made later in https://musicbrainz.org/edit/122791893
I have an ancient thinkpad that I use a couple of times a year _just for reading cds_ and and have considered retiring it. But all the CD drives I see on amazon look like disposable crap.
I have the Pioneer BDR-XS07S slot loading external BluRay burner drive and it does a great job ripping audio CDs.
There's also no way to use mini CD/DVDs with them. Not that those were ever super popular but if you have any it's an annoyance.
I replaced my SuperDrive with an 5.25" internal drive in an external powered enclosure. I can always get unreadable discs out easily, have no problem with mini discs, and I'm not stuck with an extremely short USB cable.
A SuperDrive isn't a bad option but there's better available.
I’m a fan of LibreDrive, but have you heard about any similar firmwares for this purpose?
More info about LibreDrive on the forum that hosts discussion about it and tools that it works with:
You could rather salvage the drive from an old MacBook, works great with a cheap adapter
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0BN66KFV1/donhosek
last year after having two consecutive drives crap out on me with both not wanting to eject discs or acknowledge discs that were in the drive and it has worked perfectly for me for this year. It has my strong endorsement..
I own a cd where one track name is a small icon depicting a heart stabbed with a rather lengthy knife. To my knowledge, this track has no canonical name. Any digital version of this cd betrays the respective author‘s interpretation of the icon.
And then, of course, there’s „Love Symbol“: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)
There's a handful of albums that MusicBrainz doesn't quite have the right cd naming for since one was labeled "LEFT" and the other "RIGHT" and not 1/2 -- there is no canonical 1/2 order.
Of course they can, it's up to the person designing the database schema to anticipate what is a common artistic practice and model the data accordingly. It might be that specific databases like MusicBrainz and Gracenote haven't accounted for that, but if you own the schema you can easily set up a one-to-many (parent/child) relationship between physical track and song name.
One extreme example of this would be the "Lovesexy" album by (the artist formerly known as) Prince, which in its original CD form had only one track, containing 9 songs. I think the Spotify version is still faithful to this.
This and many other common "conscious artistic choices" ought to be collected into a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Recorded Music", if that is not already a thing...
In your example above, yes it's true that many song titles and artist names are fully and partially graphic symbols with no direct text representation (another thing Prince was fond of), but again given the prevalence of this there's no reason a smart data schema couldn't model a song or artist having a 'canonical' name that can only be represented by some graphic format along with one or more pronounceable/text-encodable alternatives (TAFKAP/Love Symbol) and so on; and of course tracking the fact that the 'preferred' identifier can change over time (Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, to mention a non-Prince example).
But to stay with my example of the stabbed heart - even if the DB supported it, you’d still have to make choices when converting the icon as printed into the database, such as coloring.
But I guess it is also possible to design a schema that includes a lot of optional metadata, and clients only need to support up to certain core set of features if they choose.
I use the "lookup CD" feature in Picard, which gives me a selection of releases to choose from. Among the choices, I usually see a release matching the catalog number on my CD's case. When I don't see a matching release, I will typically add the disc ID to an existing release, or I will create a new release, or sometimes even creating a new release + new release group and add the necessary metadata to MusicBrainz.
I haven't tried any automatic tagging process like the ripping program the article talks about does, mostly because I want to use Picard to make sure the metadata is correct or contribute to MusicBrainz if it isn't.
I like MusicBrainz a lot because applications like Plex use it very well to group release groups together and will (usually) deduplicate identical recordings so that identical tracks can share a rating. It's a really great database and is kept up to date pretty well.
It makes it's best attempt to match with MusicBrainz, but if there's no match it it offers links to pre-seed MusicBrainz with tools like Harmony
What are you using for tag reading/writing in Go? Robust, complete options are non-existent in JavaScript land (Deno, Bun, Node, etc.), so I ended up creating a Wasm version of TagLib with a TypeScript API.
• Drag your album folders (one at a time so it doesn't get confused) into the pane that initially shows "Unclustered Files (0)" and "Clusters (0)".
• Select the "Clusters" folder in that pane and click "Lookup". This will find any close matches, and in my experience works ~25% of the time.
• For albums that weren't auto-matched, right-click the album folder name and choose "Search for similar albums…". As long as you're sorting by "Score", often you'll find a reasonably-good match in the top 5 options.
• NEVER use "Scan", basically.
For matched albums, carefully review things like album covers, titles, etc. before you "Save" the updated metadata. After using it to rebuild my personal music library, including ~200 contributions to the MusicBrainz database, I still haven't cracked (for example) how to stop Picard from defaultly replacing a perfect, 1500px album cover with a less-good, 1000px cover from its database.
never use "scan" because it will never work? or because it is somehow destructive and will mess up your "cataloging"?
Scanning a Cluster should (IMO) cause Picard to generate a series of AcoustID fingerprints/IDs from the tracks, then use that series to identify the best match (with extra points for handling missing tracks, etc.). But especially in the case of collections/compilations, the end result often resembles a transporter accident. Thankfully it's non-destructive, so it's straightforward to "Remove" all of the tracks you dragged in earlier along with the various albums that MusicBrainz created during the discombobulation process.
To be clear, my overall opinion of MusicBrainz and MusicBrainz Picard is that they are unappreciated triumphs. It would be nice if Wikipedia and Internet Archive diverted 0.01% of their fundraising to them. Google is the primary hero in their story, supporting them with over $500K so far. https://metabrainz.org/sponsors
Seconded, it's the best specialised UI I've seen in a while.
By "specialised" I mean it's entirely bespoke to a specific task and no other, with a small amount of dedicated jargon, like those industrial control panels full of buttons, toggles, and blinkenlights.
At first it's completely alien and appears to do weird stuff, possibly counterintuitive even (the mentioned "Scan" usage†, "what are clusters?", "why do I even need to cluster first?", "how do I save changes?")
But once you get the hang of it it's incredibly efficient with a ton of small niceties, like dragging a selection of entries from the left side will apply whatever candidates you have on the right side to the selection in order starting from the first.
† I use scanning only when album matching fails for whatever reason, it does sometimes unearth entries that wouldn't appear otherwise.
There are a few items in there to control if it scans external or overwrite. Recently went thru this as apparently for some reason I had totally disabled it. Think I was trying to speed up scanning as it would download every artwork for a large group into the temp folder. I usually force it to make an external file. I pick what it suggested 'cover'. Then use something like fileoptimizer to recompress the jpg/png it comes up with. I do that because I like to embed the images. And much of what is out on the net is optimized for fast editing not 'archive'. I use mp3tag to put it back into the tag.
Scan is hit or miss. I have fed it whole albums and it will somehow find 3 other albums with some of the songs from that one. That could be because of how I have options->options->metadata->Prefered Releases set. That slider bar thing for some reason I can not wrap my head around. It is good for when you come across one of those items where someone else tagged it as 'weird al' (everything is weird al if it is funny). I have been slowly getting rid of that stuff but want to find the original album to buy. Musicbrainz can be good for that sort of thing. I have also had decent luck with it if I pre-add the albums then scan. It seems to find things better.
I have thousands of text files on my computer. I don't need to "maintain" them (beyond backups, as you mention), but if I want to find one that contains a particular phrase that I can't quite remember the exact wording for... I'd better hope I stored it in a meaningful directory's subdirectory's subdirectory, with a meaningful title.
Yeah, not much to maintain, but Picard does keep my tags up to date if necessary.
It feels safe to assume that the situation has improved since then, but I doubt seriously we’ll ever be free of typos ;)
I also stop buying at other companies...but for other companies for some reason i don;'t hold onto the ire...i just stop buying from them, and quietly move on...but Sony....i don't get it, but the dislike is crazy.
The problem with genre remains entirely unsolved across the board. The solution I use in my collection is to do what everyone else seems to do: make them up out of whole cloth. Because I'm the only one making them up, it means my labeling is at least internally consistent.
This isn't a new problem at all. Even music labels often disagree. Back when record stores were a thing, it was pretty common for different stores to categorize the same albums differently in terms of genre. I think the only way to avoid it is to stick to very, very broad categories. "Rock", for instance, covers an amazingly broad set of styles.
It seems like they might not enforce that any more since the album I was going to pick on as an example is now tagged like I have it, although I also have lower-case “my bloody valentine” Artist tags on every track with Title Cased “My Bloody Valentime” Album-Artist tag for browsing in Navidrome: https://musicbrainz.org/release/1e4c282b-8b0d-4d20-9f74-175f...
…but I already got out of the habit and will still just keep typing them out myself :)
I also always include the catalog number in the Comment field and in brackets in my folder names to separate different releases of supposedly the same thing. Good example of why you would want to do this is the 2004 vs the 2007 releases of MM..FOOD? where the last track (Kookies) had to be redone to remove the Sesame Street samples:
- 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_XcL4nYos
- 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYSwvdEfeY
Shout-out to https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ and https://fanart.tv/ for high-quality album art to embed.
If the music artist decided how it should be on the CD sleeve, and you can show that, then you can go with that. But more often than not, the sleeve is done by the record company's graphic designers, not the music artist.
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Titles
> Album and song titles are often found in upper‐case on the back cover of CDs. For example, the album Songs of Love and Hate is written as “SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE” on the cover. This is usually the choice of a graphic designer, not the artist. So, instead of copying the title from the cover, we follow certain rules to capitalize a title.
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Principle/Error_correction...
> Error Correction: There are many cases of record companies incorrectly reproducing titles or even artist names, or breaking generally accepted rules of usage for stylistic purposes. In such cases it often makes sense to fix errors and standardize irregularities, valuing correct spelling, punctuation and grammar over faithfulness to the printed release cover.
> Artist Intent: Artists sometimes choose to present names and titles in ways that deliberately contradict the rules of the language they're in (e.g. unorthodox spellings) and/or the MusicBrainz Style Guidelines. To describe the way we handle such choices, we use the term "artist intent." The general idea is that if an artist intended something to be written in a special way, then MusicBrainz should follow that intent. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find out what an artist intended. If you want to claim that some deviation from the Style Guidelines should be considered artist intent, the burden of proof lies on you.
Is that why that happens? It was always a baffling thing to me and required manual correction (and is one of the sorts of errors that made MusicBrainz less useful).
Or the team doing all the ingestion being overworked minimum wage high school grads and suddenly an entire semi truck turns up and it's just palettes of CDs completely in many various East Asian languages.
If I had to do it over I would have two fields, one for whatever best represented what the CD says (and as someone below me points out, this was usually the publisher's artistic discretion and differed between the data they sent, the back of the CD, the track list printed on the CD and the liner notes) and I would have a separate field for Title Cased Titles.
I ripped them about 15 years ago and cddb came up with track names for them, matching the ones in its Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Ambient_Works_Volume_...). I wonder if we have any evidence that the mapping from tracks to images is remotely correct.
If I did it again, which I have planned for a long time, I would require citations for every track listing. Sure, it's a big barrier, but it'd nice to get it right where possible. The primary citations would generally be to the album cover, but in cases like the Aphex Twin insanity, cites to things like interviews and label demo releases etc could definitely be valid.
More creative than a QA department.
Huh, I actually didn't think there was any metadata at all.
------
Taking a look at the metadata embedded into the disk itself, we can see that track 6 is actually titled "Don't Need a Reason" on there:
FILE "./06. Finish Ticket - Nothing Coming Soon.flac" WAVE
TRACK 06 AUDIO
TITLE "Don't Need A Reason"
ISRC USDPK2300133
INDEX 01 00:00:00It's defined by the CD-Text extension[0] to the Red Book standard.
I think classical releases probably make greater use of it to encode things like composer and arranger, since they are more important to that audience, but for the average popular music release you're only going to get the artist and title, and maybe the ISRC that few are going to care about/display anyway.
Exact Audio Copy, the author seems to have moved on to other interests, which is a shame because I was looking for something compatible with an autoloader. And it looks like dbpoweramp is the only one left in that arena.
I am allllll about the metadata. Also, a thumbnail, synced lyrics if they could be found, custom metadata for hyperlinks back to entries on Discogs and MusicBrainz, perhaps some ReplayGain values in fields on the FLAC, depending on my MP3 processing case ... but I have so many unanswered questions.
Nah, it's mostly just reached the stage where there's nothing left to do - all the "objective" stuff works as it should, and any feature adds would be a pretty heavy undertaking. It was updated a little less than a year ago, and when I contacted the author he was very responsive.
Would it be nice to have a keyboard shortcut for proper [1] cuesheet creation (ironically, all the options except the proper one have keyboard shortcuts)? Yeah, but I've learned to live with it. Would it be nice to have super-duper tagging options? I dunno, from where I'm sitting, it seems like it'd just be duplicating a bunch of foobar2000 features for negligible gain.
[1] Because nobody wants a .FLAC that starts with a few seconds of silence, inter-track gaps need to be appended to the end of the previous track, which is not how Red Book audio handles it, and means that the "proper" cuesheet format is technically a non-compliant cuesheet.
It had scratches and even holes, but somehow it worked, lol.
Contrary to what most people expect, the data pits on a CD are much closer to the label side than the shiny side - the bottom of the disc is a clear plastic layer that as far as the optics of the drive are concerned are out of focus.
98 of these channel data frames make up a timecode frame which represents 1/75th of a second of audio and has 2352 audio data bytes, 96 subcode bytes (2 frames have sync codes instead) with the remainder being sync and error correction. Timecode frames are addressable (via the timecodes embedded in the subcode data) and are the unit referred to in the TOC. This is probably what's being called a sector here. Notably, a CD-ROM sector corresponds 1:1 with a timecode frame.
Note: Red book actually just confusingly calls both of these things frames and does not use the terms "channel data frame" or "timecode frame"
”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 (information about the performers, artists, songwriters, etc.) storehouse to become a structured online database for music.”
More detail here: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/771/papers/ieeeIntelligentSystem...
So I been contributing to tmdb for the last half year or so :)
My personal workflow:
- rip the audio CD via EAC with acousticID (flac)
- retrieve metadata via beets in a script completely automated
- convert flac to mp3 via beets inplace convert (see below)
- backup the flac files to another location
- self-host navidrome and use the substreamer / dsub app and smart playlists to listen "on the go" (The Apple usb-c-to-audiojack adapter is pretty decent)
- transfer this via iTunes VM to my good old iPod Nano 7g as main listening device for audiobooks
https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/
beets convert config:
convert:
auto: no
ffmpeg: /usr/bin/ffmpeg
opts: -codec:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 0 -ac 2 -ar 48000 -map_metadata 0 -movflags use_metadata_tags
max_bitrate: 192
threads: 1edit: Ah, I missed the ipod nano part
If you own a CD and send an edit with a $5 donation, it goes on volatile and nightly; It can go to beta instantly for $100 donations and if not it'll have to be flagged for violations. If it needs to happen instantly on stable, $10000 (generous patron tier, where I will write a blog post for this entry as well) else get to it in 3 months.
Most CDs don't include metadata, so that's commonly provided by third-party databases which both don't exactly know the original intent of the producer/publisher and can make mistakes.
Is that so? Was that introduced very late in the life of CDs, or why was CDDB a thing then?
JohnFen•1d ago
dawnerd•1d ago
Even accurip was incorrect. I pretty much don't trust any of the online data sources anymore and just manually enter meta.
And don't do what I did... don't just lets beets run unattended. What a pain that was.
JohnFen•1d ago
jeffbee•1d ago
setr•1d ago
this is why it's usually better to be overaggressive with saying "I don't know" rather than crossing your fingers and shitting out an answer and hoping you get away with it.
dylan604•1d ago
One of the devs for a company I used to work shocked me when he said "bad data is better than no data" when inquiring about why the input field was limited to a drop down of pre-filled values that were irrelevant with no way of filling in correct data. At that point, I just felt the entire database was suspect
JohnFen•1d ago
I'm not saying the services are always overly incorrect, just that they're incorrect often enough that the path of least resistance was to stop using them.
dylan604•1d ago
jandrese•1d ago
Debugging is usually harder than coding, and the amount of data we are talking about is fairly small. Just typing it in could easily be faster.
pavon•1d ago
I still always use MusicBrainz, and enjoy contributing to it, but more like others enjoy contributing to Wikipedia, rather than as an efficiency boost.
[1]https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-1278
lksaar•1d ago
bananalychee•1d ago
qingcharles•1d ago
GauntletWizard•1d ago
When bandcamp releases were available but nothing was in the database, I found it quick and simple to copy+paste the track listing into MB and create a new release. Combining it with the TOC I'd already been searching for, I got perfect rips every time without much issue.
Even with a significant amount of time double checking and fixing the metadata, I consider it a good use of time. I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record.
cloud8421•1d ago
This is the spirit - I've started doing the same for releases that don't appear in MusicBrainz and it feels great knowing that I'm not just doing this for myself.
mayneack•1d ago
JohnFen•1d ago
That was how I felt about it in the earlier days, when I'd actively participate in updating/correcting the databases. I stopped feeling that way years ago, though. Right or wrong, it felt like a losing battle as so many corrections were never actually adopted.
al_borland•1d ago
JodieBenitez•1d ago
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Avamander•1d ago
cloud8421•1d ago