onotob

My web wanderings have come up with quite a bit of interesting detritus related not only to music but to meta-music as well!

MusicBrainz is attempting to create a database of metadata (a “metadatabase” if you will) regarding music. Artist name, album name, track name and number, all that stuff. This is territory well covered by the likes of freedb and Gracenote’s CDDB (otherwise known as el Diablo), but it differs in a couple of interesting ways. The folks at MusicBrainz have developed a program called a tagger to help people clean up and maintain the metadata of their MP3 libraries. The tagger uses Relatable’s audio fingerprinting technology TRM^TM in combination with the MusicBrainz database to try and determine the metadata of each song by actually listening to it. I’m not sure how accurate this is as I have yet to try it, but let’s just say I’m eager.

The MusicBrainz about page also mentions something about relating artists in the database as a means of finding new music. This is something I’m very interested in. I have been looking for a good reputation engine for music, a service which would allow me to search for an artist, see other users who also like that artist, see how the community has rated their taste in music, and then see what other bands they enjoy. So far, there’s not much going on in this respect. The paradox of the web, in which popularity kills small projects, prevents a service like this from really flourishing without drowning itself in subscriptions or blinking banner ads.

Enter our next contestant. Audioscrobbler (down as of this posting due to said paradox) is taking this concept in a novel direction. Starting as just a WinAmp plugin, with other platforms and players to follow, you start building a relational music database just by listening to your music while connected to the Internet. With the site being down, I can’t really post more details at this time.

In other news, another post about turntable music, this one about a class on the subject at Berklee College of Music, has turned MetaFilter into a frothing-at-the-mouth bar brawl with the This Signals The End Of Music crowd on one side, the You Wouldn’t Know Good Music If It Was Coming Out Your Ass crowd on the other and the Can’t We All Just Get Alongs whimpering softly in the corner.

Posted at 4:19 pm.