Nikki Giovanni
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. is an American poet, commentator and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, nonfiction essays, covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature, she has won numerous awards, including the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has been named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends". Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the "Poet of the Black Revolution". During the 1970s, she began writing children's literature, co-founded a publishing company, NikTom Ltd, to provide an outlet for other African American women writers.
Over subsequent decades, her works discussed social issues, human relationships, hip hop. Poems such as "Knoxville, Tennessee" and "Nikki-Rosa" have been re-published in anthologies and other collections. Giovanni has taught at Queens College and Ohio State, is a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Following the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, she delivered a chant-poem at a memorial for the shooting victims. Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Yolande Cornelia, Sr. and Jones "Gus" Giovanni. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio where her parents worked at Glenview School. In 1948, the family moved to Wyoming, sometime in those first three years, Giovanni's sister, began calling her "Nikki." In 1958, Giovanni moved to Knoxville, TN to live with her grandparents and attend Austin High School. In 1960, she began her studies at her grandfather's alma mater, Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee as an "Early Entrant" which meant that she could enroll in college without having finished high school first.
She clashed with the Dean of Women, Ann Cheatam, was expelled after neglecting to obtain the required permission from the Dean to leave campus and travel home for Thanksgiving break. Giovanni moved back to Knoxville where she worked at a Walgreens Drug Store and helped care for her nephew, Christopher. In 1964, Giovanni spoke with the new Dean of Women at Fisk University, Blanche McConnell Cowan, who urged Giovanni to return to Fisk that fall. While at Fisk, Giovanni edited a student literary journal, reinstated the campus chapter of SNCC, published an essay in Negro Digest on gender questions in the Movement. In 1967, she graduated with honors with a B. A. in History. Soon after graduation, she suffered the loss of her grandmother, Louvenia Watson, turned to writing to cope with her death; these poems would be included in her anthology, Black Feelings, Black Talk. In 1968, Giovanni attended a semester at University of Pennsylvania and moved to New York City, she attended Columbia University and published Black Feeling, Black Talk.
In 1969, Giovanni began teaching at Livingston College of Rutgers University. She was an active member of the Black Arts Movement beginning in the late 1960s. In 1969, she gave birth to Thomas Watson Giovanni, her only child. In 1970, she began making regular appearances on the television program Soul!, an entertainment/variety/talk show which promoted black art and culture and allowed political expression. Soul! Hosted important guests like Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin, Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Gladys Knight, Miriam Makeba, Stevie Wonder, she published multiple poetry anthologies, children's books, released spoken word albums from 1973-1987. Since 1987, she has taught writing and literature at Virginia Tech, where she is a University Distinguished Professor, she has received the NAACP Image Award several times, received twenty honorary doctorates and various other awards, including the Rosa Parks and the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters.
She holds the key to several different cities, including Dallas, New York City, Los Angeles. She is a member of the Order of the Eastern Star, she has received the Life Membership and Scroll from the National Council of Negro Women, is an Honorary Member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Giovanni was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early 1990s, underwent numerous surgeries, her book Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems, published in 1999, contains poems about nature and her battle with cancer. In 2002, Giovanni spoke in front of NASA about the need for African Americans to pursue space travel and published Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems which dealt with similar themes, she has been honored for her life and career by the History Makers along with being the first person to receive the Rosa L. Parks Women of Courage Award, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor from Dillard University in 2010. In 2015, Giovanni was named one of the Library of Virginia's "Virginia Women in History" for her contributions to poetry and society.
Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer who killed 32 people in the Virginia Tech shooting on April 16, 2007, was a student in one of Giovanni's poetry classes. Describing him as "mean" and "menacing", she approached the department chair to have Cho taken out of her class, said she was willing to resign rather tha
DJ Shadow
Joshua Paul Davis, better known by his stage name DJ Shadow, is an American record producer and DJ. He first gained notice with the release of his acclaimed debut studio album, Endtroducing...... He has a personal record collection of over 60,000 records. DJ Shadow was experimenting with a four-track recorder while in high school in Davis and began his music career as a disc jockey for the University of California, Davis campus radio station KDVS. During this period he was significant in developing the experimental hip-hop style associated with the London-based Mo' Wax record label, his early singles, including "In/Flux" and "Lost and Found", were genre-bending, merging elements of funk, hip hop, jazz and used-bin found records. Andy Pemberton, a music journalist, writing for Mixmag, coined the term "trip hop" in June 1994 to describe Shadow's "In/Flux" single and similar tracks being spun in London clubs at the time, he has cited Kurtis Mantronik and Prince Paul as influences on his sample-based sound, further claiming that "lyrics were confining, too specific."
His music features more than short clips of voices or vocal work. During 1991-1992, DJ Shadow remixes were released on Hollywood BASIC, a short-lived rap/hip-hop subsidiary label of Hollywood Records. Notable amongst these is a 1992 compilation release titled "BASIC Beats Sampler", which features a remix of "The Real Deal", a song by Lifers Group, as well as a 12-plus-minute "Mega Mix" of the rest of the album, including tracks by west-coast underground hip-hop act, Raw Fusion and east-coast acts, Organized Konfusion and Zimbabwe Legit. In 1992, Shadow contributed scratching and production work to Sleeping with the Enemy, the controversial second release by rapper Paris. Early in 1993, Shadow was a part of the creation of the Solesides underground hip-hop label, in conjunction with Blackalicious and Lyrics Born; the first 12" release on this new imprint was titled "Entropy," with the A-side containing the Asia Born track "Send Them" and a dub rendition of the DJ Shadow track "Count and Estimate," and the entire B-side consisting of the 17-plus-minute title track.
Rapper Gift of Gab is featured in the version of "Estimate" that appears in Entropy. Shadow continued to participate in releases on the Solesides label for years to come, until the label was disbanded in favor of Quannum Projects. In 1993, Mo' Wax's James Lavelle contacted Shadow about releasing "In/Flux" on the fledgling imprint; the association with Mo' Wax was a productive one. Shadow worked with DJ Krush during this period. On a 1995 visit to the Mo' Wax Studios in London, Shadow was recruited to perform scratches on a James Lavelle and Tim Goldsworthy mix of the Massive Attack song "Karmacoma". Shadow's first full-length work, Endtroducing..... was released in late 1996 to critical acclaim. Endtroducing would go on to make the Guinness World Records book for "First Completely Sampled Album" in 2001; the only pieces of equipment Shadow used to produce the album were the AKAI MPC60 12-bit sampling drum machine, a pair of turntables and a borrowed-by-visiting Pro Tools setup from an early adopter of the technology, Dan "The Automator" Nakamura.
In November 2006 Time magazine named it one of its "All-Time" 100 best albums. In November 2014, automobile maker Chevrolet used a sample of DJ Shadow's "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt" in a Chevy commercial. In 1998 Shadow released Preemptive Strike, a compilation of early singles; that year, he produced Psyence Fiction, the debut album by Unkle, a long-time Mo' Wax production team that featured guest appearances including Thom Yorke, Richard Ashcroft, Mike D, Kool G. Rap, Jason Newsted, among others. Around 2000 he produced the score for the documentary Dark Days filmed by British director Marc Singer; this film is about a community of transients. It has six award wins in various competitions. Nearly six years after his debut production album, his second album, The Private Press, was released in June 2002. In the same year, the movie Scratch was released to DVD with DJ Shadow appearing several times throughout the movie. A video for his track "Six Days" was released in 2002, directed by Wong Kar-wai.
The album was mixed by Jim Abbiss. In 2004, Shadow's first feature-length DVD, In Tune and on Time, was released, it features a live performance in London. The Outsider album was released on 18 September 2006. A special edition CD box set was released containing The Outsider, the album on CD and a DVD entitled Tour Visuals; the Outsider, which prominently featured several artists from the local San Francisco Bay Area hyphy hip hop movement, got a mixed welcome among Shadow's fans. Responding to criticisms, the DJ/producer explained on his blog why he made no apologies: "Repeat Endtroducing over and over again? That was never in the game plan. Fuck that. So I think it's time for certain fans to decide if they are fans of the album, or the artist." DJ Shadow has collaborated with fellow DJ Cut Chemist. Together they have created three popular mixtapes entitled Brainfreeze, Product Placement, the recent The Hard Sell; these mixes fuse jazz and soul. He has collaborated with several other artists, including Blackalicious, Zack de la Rocha, Keak Da Sneak, Mos Def, David Banner, Dr. Octagon, an alter ego of Kool Keith.
In 2006, he signed a deal with Universal Records. DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist toured in 2008 in support of their mixtape The
Music genre
A music genre is a conventional category that identifies some pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions. It is to be distinguished from musical form and musical style, although in practice these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Academics have argued that categorizing music by genre is inaccurate and outdated. Music can be divided into different genres in many different ways; the artistic nature of music means that these classifications are subjective and controversial, some genres may overlap. There are varying academic definitions of the term genre itself. In his book Form in Tonal Music, Douglass M. Green distinguishes between form, he lists madrigal, canzona and dance as examples of genres from the Renaissance period. To further clarify the meaning of genre, Green writes, "Beethoven's Op. 61 and Mendelssohn's Op. 64 are identical in genre – both are violin concertos – but different in form. However, Mozart's Rondo for Piano, K. 511, the Agnus Dei from his Mass, K. 317 are quite different in genre but happen to be similar in form."
Some, like Peter van der Merwe, treat the terms genre and style as the same, saying that genre should be defined as pieces of music that share a certain style or "basic musical language." Others, such as Allan F. Moore, state that genre and style are two separate terms, that secondary characteristics such as subject matter can differentiate between genres. A music genre or subgenre may be defined by the musical techniques, the style, the cultural context, the content and spirit of the themes. Geographical origin is sometimes used to identify a music genre, though a single geographical category will include a wide variety of subgenres. Timothy Laurie argues that since the early 1980s, "genre has graduated from being a subset of popular music studies to being an ubiquitous framework for constituting and evaluating musical research objects". Among the criteria used to classify musical genres are the trichotomy of art and traditional musics. Alternatively, music can be divided on three variables: arousal and depth.
Arousal reflects the energy level of the music. These three variables help explain why many people like similar songs from different traditionally segregated genres. Musicologists have sometimes classified music according to a trichotomic distinction such as Philip Tagg's "axiomatic triangle consisting of'folk','art' and'popular' musics", he explains that each of these three is distinguishable from the others according to certain criteria. The term art music refers to classical traditions, including both contemporary and historical classical music forms. Art music exists in many parts of the world, it emphasizes formal styles that invite technical and detailed deconstruction and criticism, demand focused attention from the listener. In Western practice, art music is considered a written musical tradition, preserved in some form of music notation rather than being transmitted orally, by rote, or in recordings, as popular and traditional music are. Most western art music has been written down using the standard forms of music notation that evolved in Europe, beginning well before the Renaissance and reaching its maturity in the Romantic period.
The identity of a "work" or "piece" of art music is defined by the notated version rather than by a particular performance, is associated with the composer rather than the performer. This is so in the case of western classical music. Art music may include certain forms of jazz, though some feel that jazz is a form of popular music. Sacred Christian music forms an important part of the classical music tradition and repertoire, but can be considered to have an identity of its own; the term popular music refers to any musical style accessible to the general public and disseminated by the mass media. Musicologist and popular music specialist Philip Tagg defined the notion in the light of sociocultural and economical aspects: Popular music, unlike art music, is conceived for mass distribution to large and socioculturally heterogeneous groups of listeners and distributed in non-written form, only possible in an industrial monetary economy where it becomes a commodity and in capitalist societies, subject to the laws of'free' enterprise... it should ideally sell as much as possible.
Popular music is found on most commercial and public service radio stations, in most commercial music retailers and department stores, in movie and television soundtracks. It is noted on the Billboard charts and, in addition to singer-songwriters and composers, it involves music producers more than other genres do; the distinction between classical and popular music has sometimes been blurred in marginal areas such as minimalist music and light classics. Background music for films/movies draws on both traditions. In this respect, music is like fiction, which draws a distinction between literary fiction and popular fiction, not always precise. Country music known as country and western, hillbilly music, is a genre of popular music that originated in the southern United States in the early 1920s; the polka is a Czech dance and genre of dance music familiar throughout Europe and the Americas. Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the early 1950s, developed into a range of different styles in the 1960s and particular
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by Meredith Corporation, that covers film, music, Broadway theatre and popular culture. Different from celebrity-focused publications like Us Weekly, In Touch Weekly, EW concentrates on entertainment media news and critical reviews. However, unlike Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, which are aimed at industry insiders, EW targets a more general audience; the first issue was published on February 16, 1990. Created by Jeff Jarvis and founded by Michael Klingensmith, who served as publisher until October 1996, the magazine's original television advertising soliciting pre-publication subscribers portrayed it as a consumer guide to popular culture, including movies and book reviews, sometimes with video game and stage reviews, too.. In 1996, the magazine won the coveted National Magazine Award for General Excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors. EW won the same award again in 2002. In September 2016, in collaboration with People, Entertainment Weekly launched the People/Entertainment Weekly Network.
The network is "a free, ad-supported online-video network carries short- and long-form programming covering celebrities, pop culture and human-interest stories". It was rebranded as PeopleTV in September 2017; the magazine features celebrities on the cover and addresses topics such as television ratings, movie grosses, production costs, concert ticket sales, ad budgets, in-depth articles about scheduling, showrunners, etc. It publishes several "double issues" each year; the magazine numbers its issues sequentially, it counts each double issue as "two" issues so that it can fulfil its marketing claim of 52 issues per year for subscribers. Entertainment Weekly follows a typical magazine format by featuring a letters to the editor and table of contents in the first few pages, while featuring advertisements. While many advertisements are unrelated to the entertainment industry, the majority of ads are related to up-and-coming television, film or music events; these beginning articles open the magazine and as a rule focus on current events in pop culture.
The whole section runs eight to ten pages long, features short news articles, as well as several specific recurring sections: "Sound Bites" opens the magazine. It’s a collage of media personalities. "The Must List" is a two-page spread highlighting ten things. "First Look", subtitled "An early peek at some of Hollywood's coolest projects", is a two-page spread with behind-the-scenes or publicity stills of upcoming movies, television episodes or music events. "The Hit List", written each week by critic Scott Brown, highlights ten major events, with short comedic commentaries by Brown. There will be some continuity to the commentaries; this column was written by Jim Mullen and featured twenty events each week, Dalton Ross wrote an abbreviated version. "The Hollywood Insider" is a one-page section. It gives details, in the separate columns, on the most-current news in television and music. "The Style Report" is a one-page section devoted to celebrity style. Because its focus is on celebrity fashion or lifestyle, it is graphically rich in nature, featuring many photographs or other images.
The page converted to a new format: five pictures of celebrity fashions for the week, graded on the magazine's review "A"-to-"F" scale. A spin-off section, "Style Hunter", which finds reader-requested articles of clothing or accessories that have appeared in pop culture appears frequently. "The Monitor" is a two-page spread devoted to major events in celebrity lives with small paragraphs highlighting events such as weddings, arrests, court appearances, deaths. Deaths of major celebrities are detailed in a one-half- or full-page obituary titled "Legacy"; this feature is nearly identical to sister publication People's "Passages" feature. The "celebrity" column, the final section of "News and Notes", is devoted to a different column each week, written by two of the magazine's more-prominent writers: "The Final Cut" is written by former executive editor and author Mark Harris. Harris' column focuses on analyzing current popular-culture events, is the most serious of the columns. Harris has written among other topics.
"Binge Thinking" was written by screenwriter Diablo Cody. After several profiles of Cody in the months leading up to and following the release of her debut film, she was hired to write a column detailing her unique view of the entertainment business. If You Ask Me..." Libby Gelman-Waxer was brought in to write his former Premiere column for Entertainment Weekly in 2011. There are four to six major articles within the middle pages of the magazine; these articles are most interviews, but there are narrative articles as well as lists. Feature articles tend to focus on movies and television and less on books and the theatre. In the magazine's history, there have only been a few cover stories devoted to authors. There are seven sections of reviews in the back pages of each issue (together enc
Lyrics Born
Tsutomu "Tom" Shimura, better known by his stage name Lyrics Born, is a rapper and producer. He is one half of the duo Latyrx with Lateef the Truthspeaker. Through his childhood, Shimura lived in Tokyo, Salt Lake City and Berkeley, California, he attended Henry B. Plant High School, he changed his stage name from Asia Born to Lyrics Born in 1995 citing the desire to have his career based on his merits as opposed to his ethnicity. His first studio album, Later That Day, was released on Quannum Projects in 2003. Lyrics Born's collaborations with Lateef the Truthspeaker on Latyrx records see them trading lyrics back and forth in quick succession - Lyrics Born and Lateef's methodology for writing this type of lyric is described by Lateef in the book How to Rap: "With Latyrx stuff, when we have parts that we're writing that we're both going to be trading off, we write them together for the most part. I'll sit there and write a rhyme, like I'll write a line or two and we'll break up who's gonna say what, he'll write a line or two and we'll break up who's gonna say what.
It's a organic process." Lyrics Born Later That Day... Everywhere at Once As U Were Real People Quite a Life Latyrx The Album The Second Album Quannum MCs Quannum Spectrum Remix albums Same!@#$ Different Day As U Were Remixes Live albums Overnite Encore: Lyrics Born Live EPs The Muzapper's Mixes Disconnection EP Mixtapes Lyrics Born Variety Show Season One Lyrics Born Variety Show Season Two Lyrics Born Variety Show Season Three Lyrics Born Variety Show Season Pho Latyrical Madness, Vol. 1 Lyrics Born Variety Show Season Five: On the Floor Singles "Send Them" "Latyrx" "Burnt Pride" "Balcony Beach" "Lady Don't Tek No" "I Changed My Mind" "Hello" b/w "One Session" "Callin' Out" "Callin' Out Remix" b/w "Do That There Remix" "I'm Just Raw" b/w "Pack Up Remix" "Big Money Talk" "I Like It, I Love It" "Differences" "Top Shelf" "Hott 2 Deff" "Whispers" "Funky Hit Records" "Pushed Aside, Pulled Apart" "Oh Baby" "Lies X 3" Guest appearances Blackalicious - "Deep in the Jungle" from Melodica Blackalicious - "Release" from Blazing Arrow Diverse - "Explosive" from One A.
M. Tommy Guerrero - "Gettin' It Together" from Soul Food Taqueria Lifesavas - "Emerge" from Spirit in Stone Haiku D'Etat - "Top Qualified" from Coup de Theatre Blackalicious - "Give It to You" from The Craft DJ Z-Trip - "The Get Down" from Shifting Gears The Mighty Underdogs - "Ill Vacation" from Droppin' Science Fiction Joyo Velarde - "Strong Possibility" from Love & Understanding Lateef the Truthspeaker - "Hardship Enterprise" from Firewire Suburban Legends - "Can't Stop It" from Day Job Lotus - "Cannon in the Heavens" from Monks Production credits Blackalicious - "Do This My Way" from Nia R. L. Burnside - "Goin' Down South" and "Someday Baby" from A Bothered Mind Tracks appear on "I Changed My Mind" on Quannum Spectrum "Send Them" on Solesides Greatest Bumps Official website Lyrics Born discography at Discogs Lyrics Born on IMDb
Robert Christgau
Robert Thomas Christgau is an American essayist and music journalist. One of the earliest professional rock critics, he spent 37 years as the chief music critic and senior editor for The Village Voice, during which time he created and oversaw the annual Pazz & Jop poll, he has covered popular music for Esquire, Newsday, Rolling Stone, Billboard, NPR, MSN Music, was a visiting arts teacher at New York University. Christgau is known for his terse, letter-graded capsule album reviews, first published in his "Consumer Guide" columns during his tenure at The Village Voice from 1969 to 2006, he has authored three books based on those columns, including Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies and Christgau's Record Guide: The'80s, along with two collections of essays. He continued writing reviews in this format for MSN Music and Noisey—Vice's music section—where they are published in his "Expert Witness" column. Christgau was born in Greenwich Village and grew up in Queens, the son of a fireman.
He has said he became a rock and roll fan when disc jockey Alan Freed moved to the city in 1954. After attending a public school in New York City, he left New York for four years to attend Dartmouth College, graduating in 1962 with a B. A. in English. While at college his musical interests turned to jazz, but he returned to rock after moving back to New York. Christgau has said that Miles Davis' 1960 album Sketches of Spain initiated in him "one phase of the disillusionment with jazz that resulted in my return to rock and roll", he was influenced by New Journalism writers such as Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. "My ambitions when I went into journalism were always, to an extent, literary", Christgau said. Christgau wrote short stories, before giving up fiction in 1964 to become a sportswriter, a police reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger, he became a freelance writer after a story he wrote about the death of a woman in New Jersey was published by New York magazine. Christgau was among the first dedicated rock critics.
He was asked to take over the dormant music column at Esquire, which he began writing in June 1967. After Esquire discontinued the column, Christgau moved to The Village Voice in 1969, he worked as a college professor. From early on in his emergence as a critic, Christgau was conscious of his lack of formal knowledge of music. In a 1968 piece he commented: I don't know anything about music, which ought to be a damaging admission but isn't... The fact is that pop writers in general shy away from such arcana as key signature and beats to the measure... I used to confide my worries about this to friends in the record industry, they didn't know anything about music either. The technical stuff didn't matter, I was told. You just gotta dig it. In early 1972, he accepted a full-time job as music critic for Newsday. Christgau returned to the Village Voice in 1974 as music editor, he remained there until August 2006, when he was fired shortly after the paper's acquisition by New Times Media. Two months Christgau became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.
Late in 2007, Christgau was fired by Rolling Stone, although he continued to work for the magazine for another three months. Starting with the March 2008 issue, he joined Blender, where he was listed as "senior critic" for three issues and "contributing editor". Christgau had been a regular contributor to Blender, he continued to write for Blender until the magazine ceased publication in March 2009. In 1987, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of "Folklore and Popular Culture" to study the history of popular music. Christgau has written for Playboy and Creem, he appears about the Replacements. He taught during the formative years of the California Institute of the Arts; as of 2007, he was an adjunct professor in the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at New York University. In August 2013, Christgau revealed in an article written for Barnes & Noble's website that he is writing a memoir. On July 15, 2014, Christgau debuted a monthly column on Billboard's website. Christgau is best known for his "Consumer Guide" columns, which have been published more-or-less monthly since July 10, 1969, in the Village Voice, as well as a brief period in Creem.
In its original format, the "Consumer Guide" consisted of 18 to 20 single-paragraph album reviews, each of, given a letter grade ranging from A+ to E−. These reviews were collected and extensively revised in a three-volume book series, the first of, published in 1981 as Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies. In his original grading system from 1969 to 1990, albums were given a grade ranging from A+ to E-. Under this system, Christgau considered a B+ or higher to be a personal recommendation, he noted. In 1990, Christgau changed the format of the "Consumer Guide" to focus more on the albums. B+ records that Christgau deemed "unworthy of a full review" were given brief comments and star marks ranging from three down to one, denoting an honorable mention", records which Christgau believed may be of interest to their own target audience. Lesser albums were filed under categories such as "Neither" and "Duds" (which indicated bad records and were listed without fur
MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open data music database, similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database, a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become a structured open online database for music. MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, the length of each track; these entries are maintained by volunteer editors. Recorded works can store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata; as of 21 September 2018, MusicBrainz contained information about 1.4 million artists, 2 million releases, 19 million recordings. End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.
MusicBrainz allows contributors to upload cover art images of releases to the database. Internet Archive provides the bandwidth and legal protection for hosting the images, while MusicBrainz stores metadata and provides public access through the web and via an API for third parties to use; as with other contributions, the MusicBrainz community is in charge of maintaining and reviewing the data. Cover art is provided for items on sale at Amazon.com and some other online resources, but CAA is now preferred because it gives the community more control and flexibility for managing the images. Besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz allows looking up recordings by their acoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, must be used for this. In 2000, MusicBrainz started using Relatable's patented TRM for acoustic fingerprint matching; this feature allowed the database to grow quickly. However, by 2005 TRM was showing scalability issues as the number of tracks in the database had reached into the millions.
This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP, replacing TRM with MusicDNS. TRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008. In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired by AmpliFIND; some time after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service began having intermittent problems. Since the future of the free identification service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought; the Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis for AcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský. While AcoustID and Chromaprint are not MusicBrainz projects, they are tied with each other and both are open source. Chromaprint works by analyzing the first two minutes of a track, detecting the strength in each of 12 pitch classes, storing these 8 times per second. Additional post-processing is applied to compress this fingerprint while retaining patterns; the AcoustID search server searches from the database of fingerprints by similarity and returns the AcoustID identifier along with MusicBrainz recording identifiers if known.
Since 2003, MusicBrainz's core data are in the public domain, additional content, including moderation data, is placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license. The relational database management system is PostgreSQL; the server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products. In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye. On 20 January 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was the Barcelona, Spain-based Linkara in their Linkara Música service. On 28 June 2007, BBC announced that it has licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music Web pages; the BBC online music editors will join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database. On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.
Amarok – KDE audio player Banshee – multi-platform audio player Beets – automatic CLI music tagger/organiser for Unix-like systems Clementine – multi-platform audio player CDex – Microsoft Windows CD ripper Demlo – a dynamic and extensible music manager using a CLI iEatBrainz – Mac OS X deprecated foo_musicbrainz component for foobar2000 – Music Library/Audio Player Jaikoz – Java mass tag editor Max – Mac OS X CD ripper and audio transcoder Mp3tag – Windows metadata editor and music organizer MusicBrainz Picard – cross-platform album-oriented tag editor MusicBrainz Tagger – deprecated Microsoft Windows tag editor puddletag – a tag editor for PyQt under the GPLv3 Rhythmbox music player – an audio player for Unix-like systems Sound Juicer – GNOME CD ripper Zortam Mp3 Media Studio – Windows music organizer and ID3 Tag Editor. Freedb clients can access MusicBrainz data through the freedb protocol by using the MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway service, mb2freedb. List of online music databases Making Metadata: The Case of Mus
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