Who’s On Drums II: MusicBrainz & Songbird

It’s been a long journey but with the latest release of the MusicBrainz plugin for Songbird, the light is appearing at the end of the tunnel.  It all began with a late night desire to know who was the drummer playing on a song from my digital media player.  As simple a question as it appears, finding the answer proved to be quite difficult.  Despite all of the advances of digital technology, to date there was no simple, ‘refer to the liner notes’ answer.  While this may seem to be a trivial problem the average music listener would not be so concerned about, my inner archivist recognized it as an indication of a much deeper problem.

Music does not get created in a vacuum.  While there may be one artist or a group of artists that are put into the spotlight for the work we hear, behind the scenes there are a lot of contributors, without whom the music would have never been made.  These artists, session musicians, engineers, producers and others, are completely absent from the information about the songs we listen to on our iPhones and home media players, making the question “who’s on drums” far more difficult to answer than it should be.

A few months back I went to GtP Studios with the issue and we started thinking of a solution.  Having spent a couple of years using MusicBrainz and Picard for managing my digital collection and about a year with Songbird as my media player, I envisioned a way of brining the two together in a metadata menage that might solve the problem.  Just under a month ago GtP released the first version of a MusicBrainz add-on for Songbird.  It was a very basic solution which used a side panel to display the MusicBrainz page for the song playing in Songbird.

The latest version of the add-on, released today, takes that foundation and expands upon it.  It starts with a three tabbed dashboard layout in the sidepanel: Now Playing, Queue, Browser.  Starting in the middle, the Queue tab lets you build a queue of local files for which you can search MusicBrainz for the latest metadata.  Once you’ve found the metadata on MusicBrainz a mouse click will sync your local file with MusicBrainz adding all of the relevant track information to the local file.  You can also sync the release to your MusicBrainz collection.

During playback, if the track has been sync’d with MusicBrainz all of the metadata information will be displayed in the Now Playing tab. This tab also does additional calls to MusicBrainz to get extended information about the track, release and artist including Web Resources and related track information.  It also allows you to rate the track currently playing and have that rating sync both locally and on MusicBrainz.  Both the Now Playing tab and the Queue provide direct links to MusicBrainz pages which are opened up in the Browser tab.  Below you can see a video demonstration of all of the tabs.

This is the 0.9.0 release of the add-on.  The folk at GtP tell me that they are focused on ironing out the bugs and adding a couple of more crucial features before going to 1.0.  There’s a lot of promise in this release and those which will follow but make no mistake, as far as the issue is concerned this is still but a temporary solution. It solves my immediate concern quite well, in fact more than I even expected, but until something like this becomes a standard for all digital audio releases, the history of all of those who make the music remains in jeopardy.  It is my opinion that it is inevitable that a transition to such a standard will happen.  When it does, I can see MusicBrainz being at the center of it all and as such hope this add-on will be the catalyst which moves the initiative to the next stages.  In the meantime I’ll be using it to tag, sync and find out more information about all of the music I love.  I hope you will too.

Download the MusicBrainz Dashboard for Songbird

You May Want To Read:

• Songbird + RYM + MB = Digital Music Metadatadom
• Who’s on Drums?
• The Recording Process: Dolphin & The Airmath