I’m pleased to announce that as of right now, we have a new acoustic fingerprint provider! MusicBrainz has teamed up with MusicIP (formerly Predixis) and has integrated their MusicDNS service into MusicBrainz’ Picard Tagger. Version 0.7.0-beta1 is available for download right now!
This partnership with MusicIP promises to be beneficial for both MusicBrainz and MuiscIP. The rough overview of our new relationship looks like this:
MusicIP provides:
- Free fingerprint lookup services for official MusicBrainz projects. The fingerprint services are entirely hosted by MusicIP, which removes the burden of hosting service that is only tangential to our mission.
- A GPL/APL licensed fingerprinting client library (Open Fingerprint Architecture Library aka libofa) that is ready to integrate into new applications today!
- Other projects that wish to integrate fingerprinting services into their applications will need to sign up with the MusicDNS service. This service is free for non-profit projects (musicdns.org), and price-tiered for commercial projects such that even small startups have access. For more details, please visit MusicDNS.org.
- $10,000 held in escrow for MusicBrainz, plus contractual commitment to supply hardware resources should MusicIP exit the fingerprinting business. This is designed to allow us to continue the service should they decide to stop providing the service.
- a 10% cut on all income earned from fingerprinting queries where MusicBrainz metadata is provided via the MusicDNS service.
- 800K acoustic fingerprint ids (PUIDs) that which are already loaded into our DB.
- Travel, lodging and registration costs for myself to attend the SXSW
conference, where all of this is being announced and released. - Allow us to exhibit in the MusicIP booth at SXSW this week. Including displaying our logo!
MusicBrainz provides:
- One free live data feed for MusicIP’s use.
- The right for MusicIP to sub-license the MusicBrainz data to their customers as part of their product offering — at full list price. MusicIP takes no cut.
- Community support of the Open Fingerprint Architecture library. Many of the exact details on where the source code will live still need to be worked out over the next few weeks.
As you can see, the deck is stacked much in our favor. MusicIP has gone above and beyond the call of duty to setup this relationship. We’re all very excited by this new partnership, since it extends our reach into the commercial realm and welcomes MusicIP into the open source world. We are also announcing a partnership with the Creative Commons where MusicBrainz will now be able to track Creative Commons licenses.
Due to all of this, there has been a lot of frantic development at MusicBrainz over the last 8 weeks. Moving to a new colocation facility, more bandwidth, more servers, a new web service and a new text search were all in preparation for today. As you may have noticed, the MusicBrainz service has been a little bit more spotty as we’ve worked hard to push out new features and move to the new colo. The good news is that we’ve brought more database servers online to help spread the load to more machines as people come to investigate our new version of the Picard Tagger. Hopefully the web site should still respond well even if the replicated servers are working hard to handle the new web service traffic for Picard 0.7.0. Once I return from SXSW, I’ll be focusing on getting the service stable, better documented and generally ready for the future.
Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank Relatable for the use of their TRM fingerprint technology. Without Relatable MusicBrainz would’ve never been able to grow as fast as it has. I appreciate everything that Relatable has done for MusicBrainz, but MusicBrainz has simply outgrown TRM and it is time to move on. We will continue to provide the TRM service for another 6 months from today. If you have an application that uses TRM, please visit MusicDNS.org today to find out how you can migrate to this new fingerprinting service.
I bet there will be tons and tons of questions. I will batch up the questions and the post up follow up messages to try and respond to your questions.
Technorati Tags: acoustic fingerprinting, musicbrainz
