On the Wrong Track

That's the title of an interesting article I found on Thursday's edition of The Wall Street Journal Europe. It highlights the increasing issue of music metadata, i.e. information on digital music files, like track name and number, artist(s), album title, genre and so forth. Back in the now old days of physical medium like LPs and CDs, one didn't have to look very far to find those information printed on the disc cover.

Today, music metadata has become as important, if not more, than the actual music they describe, a fact taken early on by grass-roots efforts like CDDB (CD DataBase - acquired since then by GraceNote) doing a great job at giving information on CDs. But while CDs were still providing some structure, the proliferation of "non-physical" music sources such as homemade rips, digital music stores, and above all file-sharing, makes it far more complex to organize gigabyte-sized music libraries.

In that sense, I have been positively surprised after several months of using it by the quality of MusicBrainz, a self-moderating metadatabase that helps identify not only CDs but also mp3 and other digital formats through some clever fingerprinting as well as community-powered updating and editing - in short a Wiki for music information. In my view, the next logical step is to have such smart recognition directly integrated into media players like iTunes: as Suw underlines, the comings and goings between MusicBrainz and iTunes are tedious, to say the least. Even better would be coupling such a music recognition tool with a recommendation service like Last.FM: information not only about the track I'm listening to, but on the ones I may also like as well.

Once again, bringing back relevant context to the digital media experience.