A community driven music database from the MetaBrainz Foundation, San Luis Obispo, California that is used to identify track and artist data on CDs as well as MP3, MP4, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and other compressed files. Developed in the mid-1990s when the CDDB database became commercial, MusicBrainz was founded as an open system that allows registered users to update and edit the database. In a given week, more than a thousand users make edits, and by 2009, more than 400,000 had registered to do so.
Files are tagged with the Picard client application, which identifies songs by computing an acoustic fingerprint based on the MusicDNS technology and matching it against the MusicBrainz database. Other tagger applications, such as Magic MP3 Tagger and the Java-based Jaikoz, use the MetaBrainz database. See
MusicDNS and
music search.