Other Databases

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Other Databases of Music Metadata and Information

MusicBrainz is not unique as a database of music information. There are at least the following others:

  • This list is long and unwieldy. I've tried to break it up into roughly similar sites, but the groups need to be labeled by general category (cf. IntelligentPlaylistGeneration) and license for their data (GPL, CreativeCommons, proprietary, etc.). @alex

Open Data

Free as in FreeDocumentatinLicense or CreativeCommons.

Data available at no cost

Free as in "Free beer, if you drink it in my bar".

  • Discogs:
  • http://www.discogs.com/ - commercial site, though part of it is free; unlikely to want to share all of its data, it may be willing to share a subset -- Anonymous Coward
  • http://www.gnod.net/ - nifty little engine that deals with relating artists to each other; the database doesn't appear to be publicly available, but the service is free and in a very usable state
  • Music City:

Proprietary

  • http://music.predixis.com/ - proprietary, fingerprint based; automatically analyzes music files to create lists of similar songs, artists and albums


Others

The following is still unsorted

  • Echo Cloud: http://www.echocloud.net/ [not working] - database of related artists (if you like xxx then you might like yyy) based on crawling P2P networks
  • Music Plasma: http://www.musicplasma.com/ - very pretty related artist mapping database with audio clips; very little documentation so not sure where their data comes from
  • UPC Database: http://www.upcdatabase.com/ - database of BarCodes including music CDs (as well as DVDs, nappies and other assorted goods)
  • The Covers Project: http://www.coversproject.com/ - building a database of cover songs (songs performed by an artist other than the original performer)
  • Cover Songs Database: http://slicks.ulyssis.org/coverdb/ - similar to above, but also tracks usage in samples - Down as of 5/24/07
  • coverinfo.de: http://www.coverinfo.de/index.php?page=lang - large database that lists more than 50000 cover songs and samples, main site and interface in German, but there is also an user guide in English
  • Daz.com - Seems to mainly source data from freedb
  • BPMDataBase: http://www.bpmdatabase.com/ - database of dance music tracks with their bpm for DJs
  • Wolf's Kompaktkiste: http://www.kompaktkiste.de/
  • The Free Track Info Xchange: http://www.threetix.net - works with the Microsoft Deluxe CD Player, and also has a "universal" data converter (PLC)
  • CDArchiv: http://www.cdarchiv.de - German site, database supports the Hitbase application
  • Music Recommender: http://recommender.ipsi.fhg.de/music/cds.aspx - database of related CDs (if you like xxx then you might like yyy) based on crawling music playlists
    • sorry, description is in German:
      • Just type in an artist you like and press enter (e.g. “art bla” for “Art Blakey”, who does relaxed jazz music) --> Result: every CD which starts with "art bla" is displayed
      • Select a CD out of the given list and enjoy our similarities (by clicking a headphone-icon you will be forwarded to amazon.de)
  • Gracenote (formerly CDDB) - who inspired us to start by stealing all the public data

(please add any more you know of)



The above are all general purpose music databases that we have considered working with (well, not Gracenote!). There are probably hundreds of specialist ones like:

Examples of a more tightly-focused database that is crying out to be built on top of a MusicBrainz foundation:

I think a certain type of person would love to have their CD collection info on the web, all nicely hyperlinked and with daft statistics. Maybe listing recent additions to the collection on their weblog like people list books they're currently reading or what they're currently listening to in iTunes.



The main site currently has a Search Links page that links to the main pages and search features of some of the databases listed above, as well as others; it's pretty obscure (hidden in a second level SiteMenu entry), out-of-date (doesn't include recent additions like MusicMoz), and broken (www.allmusic.com search doesn't work). It does, however, include a number of links to lyrics sites, which might be problematic if MusicBrainz could be considered to be a contributor by linking to sites that infringe the copyrights on lyrics.

It is in this context that we should consider the comment that http://lyrictracker.com is missing (from the list above, as well as the SearchLinks page), and the following note from somebody associated with http://www.songtexts.net:

  • I've got a Lyrics Database available with XML streams right now. Do you think it might be something for the future to add these pages to MusicBrainz. It's possible to look up certain lyrics from an artist? I'd be interested in working with you guys in the future.