Linux Multimedia Hacks

Correct Music Metadata with MusicBrainz

Learn about MusicBrainz and how to use and contribute to the project.

MusicBrainz aims to aggregate the “brainz” of thousands of music lovers to create an open, user-contributed, music encyclopedia. MusicBrainz collects information about the music artists have released and how musical works and musicians relate to one another. In turn, people can use the project along with tools that utilize MusicBrainz (see “Tools that Use MusicBrainz”) to add metadata to their audio files and correct the data that is already there. The community of moderators (editors) collects information about all kinds of music, regardless of its genre, time period, ethnicity, or religion. Unlike some music information databases out there, MusicBrainz strives to eliminate duplicate data, fix incorrect data, and augment missing data. The end result is a project that can be used as a general music reference, a place to share your music trivia, and as a reference to use for cleaning up your music collection.

MusicBrainz got its start in 1998 as the CD Index, which intended to provide an open data/open source alternative to the formerly open CDDB project. After a short while, the CD Index reinvented itself as MusicBrainz and expanded its focus to include support for tagging digital music files and not just Audio CDs. Today MusicBrainz has more than 100,000 members and information for over 3,000,000 tracks.

MusicBrainz’s Database

The MusicBrainz database contains a list of artists, ...