Amplifind, the company that operates the MusicDNS/PUID service, recently sold its intellectual property and the PUID service will be going away eventually. It is exactly this reason why we’ve been uncomfortable relying on closed source fingerprinting software to make MusicBrainz tick.
Fortunately, I’m pleased to announce that the open source fingerprint era has begun!
Lukáš Lalinský has been working on acoustid for months now and today the EchoNest, in conjunction with 7Digital and MusicBrainz, has issued a press release that announces Echoprint, their fully open source fingerprinting solution.
The source code has already been released on github: echoprint-server and echoprint-codegen.
We’re pleased to announce preliminary support for Echoprint in MusicBrainz on our echoprint test server. The Echoprint system works similarly to how PUIDs work in MusicBrainz right now. You can use echoprints anywhere you can use PUIDs on the Echoprint test server. The version 2 of our XML web service (on the echoprint test server) now supports submitting and fetching Echoprints. To submit an Echoprint, refer to our web service documentation and example page and use echoprint wherever you’d use puid. For instance, to submit an Echoprint to the test server, POST an XML document like the one below to the /ws/2/recording resource:
<metadata xmlns="http://musicbrainz.org/ns/mmd-2.0#">
<recording-list>
<recording id="e97f805a-ab48-4c52-855e-07049142113d">
<echoprint-list>
<echoprint id="TRN5NGX1187AB4F786"/>
<echoprint-list>
<recording>
<recording-list>
<metadata>
Although it remains to be seen when the Echoprint system will be mature enough for inclusion on the live MusicBrainz servers, going forward MusicBrainz will only support fully open source fingerprint solutions, starting with Echoprint and acoustid. We are saying no to more closed source solutions, which have never worked out well for us. MusicDNS/PUID is now officially end of life and should not be used anymore in new development.
We look forward to working with the EchoNest closely to finish up the development of the Echoprint system and to fully integrate it into MusicBrainz when it matures.
MetaBrainz Blog 
Great news! Since both solutions seem to be open-source, are they so different that they can’t work together? Makes it sense to employ two fingerprinting systems at the same time? Is there some comparison posted somewhere?
This has been a long time coming, glad to hear it! I’m going to start playing with this today.
hrglgrmpf: I don’t see a way how we could work together. Echoprint is a commercial technology that happens to have source code released under an open license. It doesn’t make sense for me to support it in my free time. It doesn’t work the other way either, the Echo Nest has no reason to support Acoustid. The projects have different goals though, so I don’t see why they couldn’t coexist.
How do the two compare quality-wise?
Should we be concerned that the open source stuff is inferior to the PUID fingerprinting?
Often open source solutions don’t achieve the same quality, but I hope I’m wrong of course 🙂
Great news! I have a question though: does this mean that all the PUIDs that were already collected/submitted to MusicBrainz are going to be useless after some time? As far as I understand, there is no way of converting a PUID into an echoprint without the original sound file…