Today I will talk about music. Well, not exactly about music, but about all the hassle I used to go through whenever I wanted to tag the MPeg Layer 3 files I want to listen on my computer.
I used to do this labour-intensive, time-consuming, manual, repetitive task by hand, and commited a lot of mistakes in the past. I longed for a tool that would be able to automate this process and make my life simpler, being at the same time less time-consuming, fully automated, and leaving the repetitive stuff for my desktop computer do handle.
Probably all the noble readers of this Blog at least once in their lives had a thought like this before.
After some search and lots of talking with the Drunken Librarian, the solution finally came to me. And, guess what? It was implemented as a Perl-based meta information database about music, named MusicBrainz
As I presume that not all my noble readers know about this useful tool.
MusicBrainz describes himself as
(...) a user-maintained community music metadatabase. Music metadata is information such as the artist name, the release title, and the list of tracks that appear on a release. MusicBrainz collects this information about recordings and makes it available to the public. The web site is the interface which allows the creation and maintenance of the data. All of the data in MusicBrainz is user contributed and user maintained.
Well, definitions apart, MusicBrainz also have some impressive numbers associated with them: they hold information about 420,000 artists, and information about more than 630,000 releases of more than 250,000 albums. The community maintained by the service have thousands of active users, and hold a total of almost 7,000,000 editions since 2003 and answers to more than 500,000 queries a day from all over the world.
I use the service for about one year, and it usually surprises me, knowing about all unexpected and rare music and authors that I would have a hard time identifying by myself. It's a great service, quite reliable, running for more or less 10 years, and one that I say proudly that uses Perl.
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