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MusicBrainz IDs

MusicBrainz aims to be a comprehensive music database that will allow people and computers to have meaningful conversations about music. In order to facilitate these meaningful conversations, Music­Brainz needs to identify each Artist, Album, and Track with a unique identifier.

Furthermore, Music­Brainz works with the Relatable TRM technology, which generates an acoustic fingerprint for a digital music file. This acoustic fingerprint is called the TRM ID. A user can run an MP3 (or other digital audio file) through a TRM ID generator like the MB Tagger, and then request the artist, album, and track information from MusicBrainz. With this retrieved information you can then rename the file and write clean ID3 tags. See MusicBrainzTags for details.

All IDs in Music­Brainz look like standard unique identifiers. For example:

   '''95807106-af9f-417d-b1d0-d287c5504ec1''' 
 

• ArtistIDs:

  • are unique IDs used to identify an artist.

• AlbumIDs:

  • are unique IDs used to identify a collection of tracks in a sequence on a single medium.

• TrackIDs:

  • are arbitrary IDs that are assigned by the MusicBrainz server when it accepts a track into the database. This ID is unique and will not change over time, so that people can use this identifier to refer to this track and only this track.

• TRM IDs:

  • are assigned by the Relatable TRM signature generator, and look exactly like other ids in Music­Brainz. However, TRM ids are not guaranteed to be unique -- due to the quality of an encoding or the quality of a decoder, tracks that sound the same to a human may yield different TRM ids. They are being phased out in favor of MusicIP's PUIDs. However, TRMs will be supported until PUIDs surpass the functionality of TRMs.

The IDs are also stored in tags music files by the MusicBrainzTagger applications. See MusicBrainzTag for detailed information.

Other Identifiers used by MusicBrainz

• DiscID:

  • an ID calculated from the TOC of a CD.

• PUID:

  • the IDs used in the proprietary MusicDNS AudioFingerprinting system which is operated by MusicIP.

Discussion

I've added DiscID and PUID to this page, however they aren't UUIDs, though they are unique IDs used in the MusicBrainz database. -- MartinRudat 2006-04-25 02:26:00

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