CD Stub

CD Stubs Feature

In the Server release on November 23, 2008 MusicBrainz is introducing the concept of a CD Stub. Many times people would like to contribute CD data to MusicBrainz, but would prefer to not learn to be part of MusicBrainz. These people would rather just toss some data into a pile and go on with their lives to listen to their music or rip their CDs. CD Stubs enable users to do just that.

With this release people who come to look up a CD, but MusicBrainz does not know about that CD, will be given a choice to either enter the CD as a CD Stub or to join MusicBrainz and to enter the CD into MusicBrainz proper. (This is the red pill/blue pill decision point). Note that users who are logged in to MusicBrainz when looking up a CD will not be given the option to enter a CD Stub.

During the CD Stub data entry process, the user can choose to import from the data from FreeDB and then review the data and submit it as a CD Stub. Once the data has been entered as CD Stub, the data can be retrieved using the MusicBrainzXMLWebservice for 14 days. After the 14 days we stop serving out this data until another user comes along and attempts to submit the data to MusicBrainz via the web interface. On the web interface the user can review the data and hit submit; after this the data will be served out for another 14 days.

The goal here is to encourage people to look at the data and for the data to improve as people use it. At the same time the server keeps track of how many times the CD Stub was requested and how many times it was reviewed and re-submitted. This allows us to show the Most Active CD Stubs to MusicBrainz Editors and allow them to import the data into the main MusicBrainz database. This flow of data gives MusicBrainz a real life view of what data is important in the world and it enables MusicBrainz editors to participate in making the database more useful for everyone.

Also, this allows us to supplant FreeDB. And it allows us to store untrusted meta-data like the CD Baby music metadata catalog and to actively serve this content without having all of it in the main database.

Please watch this space as we get closer to the release of the server. More technical details will be added here on how to use this new service.