Other Databases

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Revision as of 22:33, 27 September 2011 by Reosarevok (talk | contribs)
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MusicBrainz is not unique as a database of music information. There are at least the following others:

General Purpose

Site Description/Notes Access License Advanced Relationship
Wikipedia Wiki-based free general interest encyclopedia. It's possible to Link Wikipedia And MusicBrainz. Free Creative Commons Yes
FreeDB Open version of CDDB. MusicBrainz supports importing FreeDB data Free GPL No
Discogs Commercial site, switched to a public domain license for its data in early 2008. Free Public Domain Yes
MusicMoz Comprehensive directory of all things music, edited by volunteers. Imports data from MusicBrainz. Free MusicMoz Data Use License Yes
Allmusic Commercial site. Part of content is freely available. Free Proprietary Yes
Gracenote (formerly CDDB) Commercial site. Inspired MusicBrainz to start by stealing all the public data Proprietary No
Rate Your Music Metadata database allowing users to rate and review albums. Commercial site. Free Proprietary No
SoundUnwound Amazon fork of MusicBrainz database. Free Proprietary Auto-linked from the Affiliates section

Thematic

Site Description/Notes Access License Advanced Relationship
SoundtrackCollector Movie soundtrack database. Free No
VGMdb Database of videogame music Free Yes
Encyclopaedia Metallum Database of bands from various forms of heavy metal music Free No
SA-CD.net Database referencing Super Audio CDs Free No
Encyclopédisque Database of French 7" Free No
Soundamental Database of French singles and albums. Has catnos and barcodes Free No

Covers

Site Description/Notes Access License Advanced Relationship
The Covers Project A database of cover songs (songs performed by an artist other than the original performer). Use MusicBrainz data. Free No
Second Hand Songs A database of cover songs containing 76422 songs (18172 originals, 56538 cover songs and 1712 songs with samples) (2008-06-24) Free Yes
coverinfo.de 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 Free No

Classical

Site Description/Notes Access License Advanced Relationship
International Music Score Library Project Holds the Petrucci Music Library, an internet-based collaborative music score library. Free Public Domain Yes (as "has score"
MusOpen Online music library of copyright free (public domain) music. Offers free music and sheet music downloads. Free Public Domain No




Open Data

Data available at no cost

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

  • Band Booking Genius:
    "Band Booking Genius streamlines booking live music for Concerts, Festivals, Corporate, Special & Private Events.Search by Event Date, Budget, Genre, Band Name, Location, & and other search filters for over 80,000 bands. Photos,MP3's & descriptions provided for each band."
  • GnoD:
    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
  • Web Music Database:
  • Music City:
    "Collaborative" music and artists DB. Has content from Amazon and no copyright statement (see also thread in their forum). Beta. Does not seem to be very active as of June 2005.

Proprietary

  • Predixis MusicMagic:
    http://music.predixis.com/ - proprietary, fingerprint based; automatically analyzes music files to create lists of similar songs, artists and albums
  • Fix Tunes:
    proprietary, analyzes MP3s and corrects tags


Others

The following is still unsorted

  • 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)
  • Daz.com - Seems to mainly source data from freedb
  • BPMDataBase: http://www.bpmdatabase.com/ - database of dance music tracks with their bpm for DJs - Slowly dying in 2008 due to spam submissions and no non-spam submissions.
  • 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
  • VIAF - VIAF is a database that links the person name entries of national libraries together. It should contain every person that has ever released a work.

(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.

Defunct Databases

  • http://www.moodlogic.com/ - proprietary, fingerprint based. mood and genre matching "Effective March 3, 2008, Macrovision announces the end of life (EOL) of the Moodlogic music management and recommendation software."
  • MusicMatch: Their database was taken offline in September, 2007, when Yahoo! aquired them. Yahoo! has since discontinued the MusicMatch software and database completely.

See also