MusicBrainz integration

[Gregory Opera]

I'd love to see the ability to download missing metadata for music from MusicBrainz (the Open Source equivalent of Sony's CDDB/Gracenote)... Either automatically, or on-request (by the user).

Ubuntu for mobile devices is already very much an "online first" operating system and my understanding is that this is unlikely to change anytime soon, so it is reasonable to expect that MusicBrainz integration would have access to a data connection most - if not all - of the time.

[Victor Thompson (vthompson)]

Hi Gregory, thanks for taking the time to help make the Music app and Ubuntu better! It would be nice to include some means of populating missing metadata either automatically or in an on-demand fashion. Currently the app only has read privileges for the ~/Music/ root path and unless the case is compelling enough, I think the Security people would like to see it stay that way.

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

I'm not sure how well MusicBrainz would work at taking the existing file's metadata tags and improve them. When I've updated my own music using Picard, to get good results I've had to pass it a collection of music that is part of the same album and occasionally choose something other than its first guess. I'm inclined to use the tags in a file as is if they're available and just tell users to update the files tags if they think they're wrong.

We don't want a system where the mediascanner "corrects" the tags to the wrong release and the user can't fix it.

On the other hand, if we have a file with no metadata tags at all, perhaps it'd make sense to make use of their AcoustID muisc fingerprinting system to look up metadata. I'm not sure how common this scenario is though, or how likely we are to get a useful match though.

When I looked into this kind of thing 4-5 years ago, the open source services weren't anywhere close to commercial services like EchoNest (which has since been bought out by Spotify). Things might have changed since then though. I think MusicBrainz was on a different fingerprinting system back then, for instance.

[Gregory Opera (gregoryopera)]

I wasn't suggesting that MusicBrainz should "correct" music, but rather suggest metadata for tracks or albums that contain no or missing metadata...

There's always Echoprint, which is an Open Source equivalent of Sony's "TrackID" music recognition service, so the groundwork has clearly been laid.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.