Music metadata
Metadata is the driver of MIR systems. As such, many services exist simply to provide reliable metadata for existing collections of music, either for end users or for large commercial music collections. Most music listeners use metadata in their home listening environments. A common MIR task is to seek metadata from the internet for digital music that was Bripped[ from compact disc to a computer. This is the core functionality of automatic Web-based services such as Gracenote (gracenote.com) and MusicBrainz (musicbrainz.org), both of these metadata repositories rely on user-contributed content to
scale track-level music description to millions of entries. These services provide both factual metadata, namely objective truths about a track, and cultural metadata, which
contains subjective concepts. For a metadata system to work its descriptions of music must be accurate and the meaning of the metadata vocabulary widely understood.
Web 2.0 provides a partial solution in that communities of users can vote on a track’s metadata. This democratic process at least ensures that the metadata for a track is consistent with the usage of one, or more, communities.
Problems associated with factual information, artist, album, year of publication, track title, and duration, can severely limit the utility of metadata. Ensuring the generality of the associated text fields, for example, consistencies of spelling, capitalization, international characters, special characters and order of proper names, is essential to useful functioning.
