Last year I discovered the conundrum of the digital music paradigm – with all the advances of technology there’s no easy way to discover who are the musicians playing on the song you are listening to. Upon doing some research I found out that the current ID3 standards have a way to store this information, but because the major media players don’t support these metadata tags, for the most part, remain unused.
Not one to leave well enough alone I kept searching until I found MusicBrainz, the community based music metadata database. MusicBrainz is one of, if not the only service online that does keep this information, so I signed up, and as much as possible have been adding data to their database. The hope is that in the future, when the media players make the displaying of this information a standard, because of the MusicBrainz community, the data will be available. With its tagging software like Picard, getting the metadata from the site into your personal files will be quite easy.
Through using MusicBrainz I also found it to be a resource for keeping information about my own music collection. It isn’t the primary purpose for the site, but considering the metadata is associated with the items in your collection it is quite useful. As an actual collection database however, it leaves a lot to be desired.
This is where Rate Your Music comes in. A wiki style community, RYM doesn’t have all of the metadata information that MusicBrainz does, but it does make managing your personal collection more user friendly. Giving you the ability to rate the items in your collection and even provide reviews, all while sharing your information with a community of like minded music lovers, it proved to be the service I really was looking for to manage my music collection (they are even doing movies these days), except of course for the metadata stuff.
If only I could bring the two of them together. That’s where Songbird came in. Because the Mozilla based media player is open, it meant that something could be developed which would actually bring them all together in one environment. So I started talking with GtP Studios and a plan emerged.
The first stage of that plan was released this week with two add-ons for Songbird. The first pulls the track information for the currently playing song in Songbird and opens the corresponding track in the MusicBrainz database. This allows for the viewing of the metadata information which in some cases can answer the simple question I posed last year, “Who’s on drums?” It also allows for the rating of the track, navigating to the related release to add to your collection, and the adding or editing of metadata information for the track. Future development of this will go much deeper with the integration, allowing for the information from MusicBrainz to be stored with the playing file, and vice versa, populating MusicBrainz with the ID3 information from Songbird.
The second add-on pulls the release information for the currently playing track in Songbird and opens the corresponding page in Rate Your Music. From there, you can read the reviews and ratings of other users, add the release to your RYM collection, rate it and write your own review.
In an ideal future these two addons will be combined so that the information between the two sites both about the metadata and your personal collection will be linked. Even further Songbird itself will begin displaying all of the ID3 tags available so that all three are linked to reflect all of the information available for each song in your collection. There will likely be a lot of kinks to be worked out first, but that is the trajectory and I do believe with the addons released this week things are off to a good start.
Get the MusicBrainz Add-On for Songbird
Get the Rate Your Music Add-On for Songbird
You May Want To Read:
Published under: ArtTags: ID3 • mp3 • music collection • MusicBrainz • Rate Your Music • RYM • Songbird • tagging
You must be logged in to write a comment.
Loading...