MusicBrainz Identifier
One of MusicBrainz' aims is to be the universal lingua franca for music by providing a reliable and unambiguous form of music identification; this music identification is performed through the use of MusicBrainz Identifiers (MBIDs).
In a nutshell, an MBID is a 36 character Universally Unique Identifier that is assigned to each entity in the database, i.e. artists, release groups, releases, tracks, and labels. For example, the artist John Williams has an artist MBID of 53b106e7-0cc6-42cc-ac95-ed8d30a3a98e and his Greatest Hits 1969-1999 compilation has a release MBID of fff250bd-6c12-4f11-ab9e-a84568a74afb.
Using MusicBrainz Idenfiers
MBIDs play an important role when managing a digital music collection and there are several applications that are MusicBrainz enabled.
Taggers
Multiple MBIDs may be written to a file by a MusicBrainz enabled tagger application. They are commonly used to identify:
- the track itself
- the release
- the label
- the track artist
- the release artist
For more information, read the MusicBrainz tag specification.
Music players
Music player applications can take advantage of a file that has been tagged with MBIDs to do things such as:
- query the MusicBrainz Database for further information about the file or related entities
- reliably search for related files based on a unique string, instead of by potentially ambiguous strings such as artist name or release title
Uniform Resource Identifier
URIs can be constructed by prefixing the MBID with the address of the MusicBrainz server and the entity type, for example John Williams' URI becomes http://musicbrainz.org/artist/53b106e7-0cc6-42cc-ac95-ed8d30a3a98e.html, and Greatest Hits 1969-1999's URI becomes http://musicbrainz.org/release/fff250bd-6c12-4f11-ab9e-a84568a74afb.html.
See also
There are several other identifiers that MusicBrainz uses:
- Disc ID: An ID calculated from the TOC of a CD.
- PUID: The IDs used in the proprietary MusicDNS audio fingerprinting system operated by MusicIP.
- Barcode: Machine-readable numbers used as stock control mechanisms by retailers.
- ISRC: The International Standard Recording Code, an identification system for audio and music video recordings.
