TRM

TRM IDs

TRM IDs are MusicBrainz' old AudioFingerprinting system. They are being phased out in favor of MusicIPs PUIDs. However, TRMs will be supported until PUIDs surpass the functionality of TRMs.

TRM (TRM Recognizes Music) IDs are (somewhat) unique ids that represent the audio signature of a musical piece (see AudioFingerprint). Applications such as the MusicBrainzTagger can send data from a music file to the TRMServer, which will reply with a TRM ID. The TRM ID can then be used to look up the metadata for that song from the database.

MusicBrainz relies on software from Relatable to generate TRMs. Relatable has a detailed article on TRMs.

The bits of a TRM are simply IDs into Relatable's database: you can't use the TRM to find any information about the song. One effect of that is that fuzzy matching is not possible on TRMs: you can't find songs that "sound similar" to another song using MusicBrainz.

There is a utility called "trm" included in the TunePimp distribution that can be used to calculate the TRM of a music file. One use of that is to FindDuplicateMusicFiles.

The TRM system has several well known flaws, and this has led to some discussion about abandoning the TRM system completely. For more on this, see GettingRidOfTRM and FutureProofFingerPrint.

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