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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Damn, MusicBrainz is still running?

"MusicBrainz is operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a California based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping MusicBrainz free and open source." - the gloriously retro-looking front page

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Still running and still doing great! Some of us still curate a local music library instead of streaming ;)

You can curate a music library without ripping CDs tho.

Depends on your musical tastes. A good 25% of the music in my library is not available in any form other than used CDs.

What kind of music?

Not sure about OP but I have all manner of blues and jazz recordings unavailable via streaming. There are also lots of obscure Japanese game and rock recordings that aren't in Apple or Spotify though to Spotify's credit, they have a lot of game content. Streaming is mostly in service of licenses and margins which as a shareholder, that makes sense to me.

People seem to assume that any decent creative output always gets carried forward to the next form of media tech. But there are 78s that didn’t make to LP, much less anything after that.

Another example: Nick and Nora pre code films weren’t on Netflix the last time I looked.

Even local super popular rock bands from 80s don't always have their entire catalog available on streaming services, and solo endeavors of their musicians are often nowhere to be seen there.

There's also an intermediate category where an online/streaming version is available, but it's defective – a number of live Bob Dylan (!) albums from the Bootleg Series are missing the track transitions between the individual tracks. It feels like somebody forgot to include the pregaps when ripping the discs for digital distribution, and it's been like that for years…

A wide range, actually. It's more about the time period and artists than musical style. If it's earlier than the 90s and/or from an artist who wasn't big on the charts, it gets more likely that they're not available except on used CD.

In that sense, the depth and variety of good music that is available has been shrinking for a long while now. The advent of streaming seems to have made it worse.

By contrast, before I got rid of almost all my vinyl, one particular sub-collection that I had was about 200 12" singles from the London club scene in 1981-1985. Almost none of the tracks ever appeared on CD or were ever released digitally.

All of them were available on youtube, even the whitelabel DJ-only releases!

MusicBrainz has (or at least had) an acoustic fingerprint system for processing audio files too.

This is the part that tends to have the most mistakes, if used. It's generally better to provide minimal info manually if the CD wasn't identified by its ID.

Indeed! About half of my new music acquisition is on CD, the other half is Bandcamp/Qobuz/7Digital.

I can curate my own library of bookmarks within [some other body's music library] without CDs; of course I can.

I can do that with iTunes or Spotify or Tidal or Amazon Music or whatever else.

But none of these bookmarks are necessarily related to my music. They are only just bookmarks that refer to music that might exist within the libraries that these bodies provide.

And while all of these libraries are certainly quite vast, there's a fuckton of (published!) music that these commercial libraries do not provide.

I curate my own library too but it's pretty much all off of Bandcamp. I don't even own a CD drive I could rip with any more.

Even with digital releases, MusicBrainz often has more detailed metadata than the original files. And if you have a mixed library of rips and digital purchases, it is nice to use a tagger like Picard to enforce consistent directory structure and filenaming.

Seeing a Mastodon link on a clearly hand-written HTML site is neat.

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