Beginners Guide

Welcome to MusicBrainz! This beginners' guide should get you started on both correcting tags in your digital music and contributing data back to MusicBrainz. If this is your first visit to this page, it might be good to read it all before diving into more advanced topics. If you want to dive right in anyway, the How Tos are a quite good place to do so.

MusicBrainz (often abbreviated to MB) currently consists of three parts:

• The web interface and its backend, the database.
• The documentation (you're reading part of it!).
• The applications and services.

If you're like most users, you will probably start to tag your files with information that was already in the database (perhaps with Picard). But remember that MusicBrainz is user-edited, so if you find that something is missing, you can add it, and if it is wrong, you can fix it! These changes are not always applied instantly, as they pass through our voting system, so it would be good for you to check our introductions to editing and to voting that will help you understand how that works.

Documentation

The documentation includes guides and how-tos, but also the definitions for MusicBrainz terminology and the guidelines editors are expected to follow when editing. You don't need to memorise or even read all of the guidelines from the beginning, although taking a look at the ones that apply to most edits, like Titles, Artist or Release, is a very good idea.

Web interface

Before making any changes to the data, you will need to register and log in. You need to provide a valid email address, which won't be shown by default, so other editors can contact you, and then verify it (you might want to read our privacy policy).

Definitions

When an user modifies the data in any way, that's editing. This is different from the wiki-like editing you might be used to from sites like Wikipedia, because most edits must go through a voting process before being applied.

The term release refers to a specific issuing of an album, single, compilation, etc., and includes a specific set of recordings in a particular order. Different editions of a release, in different formats for example, should be entered separately.

A Disc ID is a kind of signature for a CD, and allows it to be recognised automatically. It contains the precise timing information of the CD. When you use MusicBrainz Picard, you can automatically retrieve the disc ID of your CD to include it in the MusicBrainz database (see the help about how to add disc IDs).

One of the fundamental aims of MusicBrainz is to offer correct and well structured information. To enforce this, we have guidelines which allow us to ensure the data input by all users is accurate.

Adding a release

Adding a release is probably one of the first things you will want to do. Please note that MusicBrainz aspires to have data which is as accurate as possible, and remember to follow the style guidelines!

If you have a CD, you can first see if MusicBrainz has a disc ID for it and, if not, add it (either to an existing release or while adding the release itself). For that, consult the how-to for adding disc IDs. If you have other kind of release (like a vinyl, or a digital release), or you just can't add a disc ID for some reason, you will need to search by hand. Usually the best way is to search for the title of the release. If you can't find the release you have, or the only matches in MusicBrainz are reasonably different from yours (different barcode, for example), then you have a new release and you should enter it!

It helps immensely if you can provide a link to a page containing more information on the release. Please read these tips for adding edit notes and try to follow them: a good edit note is not only useful in the moment of adding a release, but can also prove its use years later when some other user tries to find more information about it.

While welcoming bootlegs, we discourage adding a home made various mix. Our aim is toward widely reaching and readily usable accurate information. Thus your home-made compilation may be deemed not useful and be voted down (or removed later).

Pending edits

When editing MusicBrainz, be careful about edits that are open. If there is a pending edit (usually highlighted in yellow) you should check if it is already doing what you wanted to do. If so, you don't need to do anything - except voting Yes so it will be applied sooner! If it is different and you don't agree with it, you probably should say so in an edit note. Make sure you follow the Code of Conduct while doing so!

If you realise you've made a mistake, and the edit is still pending, don't enter a new edit to remove the problem! Just find your original edit and cancel it.

Guides

You might be interested in this forum post that explains how to add releases. There's also an (outdated, but still partially useful) annotated screenshot by screenshot guide for how to add a new artist, a new release, and some relationships.

And of course, you can read our how-tos on different matters.

Software

You can download MusicBrainz Picard, our tagger, to tag your digital files and submit disc IDs to MusicBrainz. If you have doubts about it, check the documentation and this illustrated how-to. You can install all kind of plugins for it too!

Discussion

Of course, remember that if you can't find an answer to some doubt in the documentation, you can (should!) ask about it.