{"slug": "musicbrainz", "name": "MusicBrainz", "category": "databases", "category_name": "Databases", "description": "Open, community-maintained encyclopedia and database of music metadata.", "recommenders": 5, "commenters": 6, "warners": 0, "score": 4.859, "rising": 1.02, "first": "2025-11-03", "latest": "2026-10-05", "why": "HN commenters value MusicBrainz as a music metadata resource for identifying and tagging personal music libraries.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 1, "compare": 0, "warn": 0}, "spark": [1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": ["Valued resource", "Tagging and identification"], "caveat": "User experience", "short_quote": "a combination of beets and MusicBrainz for tagging", "icon": true, "domain": "musicbrainz.org", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://musicbrainz.org/", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["MusicBrainz"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters value MusicBrainz as a music metadata resource", "cites": [{"id": 799471056, "item_id": 49966941, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49966941", "by": "tancop", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did", "excerpt": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did but I don't think using a tagger as a separate program you have to open and point to a file is good UX, even if the tag lookup is fully automated. It should be a daemon that auto tags all new files in the background and only prompts you when there's a problem. And if it finds a new song with metadata that's not in the database you get the option to upload it. Even better if ", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Picard 3.0"}, {"id": 782894930, "item_id": 48930933, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930933", "by": "BLKNSLVR", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "MusicBrainz[1] is also doing god's work.", "excerpt": "Edited to add first: nice article covering an important couple of critical pieces of the Internet's history. Concerning the \"Joy\" element: Someone at my workplace started a Music League, with a select few music aficionados and hangers on joining, and it has been _the best_ team bonding exercise I've ever been involved with. We have covered a broad spectrum of topics that have challenged pretty much everyone at some p", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "The lost joy of music piracy"}, {"id": 767757017, "item_id": 47984813, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47984813", "by": "gverrilla", "date": "2026-05-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Shoutout to MusicBrainz.", "excerpt": "AI helped me escape from my Spotify kidnap. The stack I use now: Docker, Lidarr, slskd, Tubifarry, Prowlarr, qBittorrent, Blissful and Soulmate. And Strawberry for playlists/playback. Shoutout to MusicBrainz. Very happy to be rebuilding my music library. And this time no song will ever become unavailable out of the blue again. I'm never going to repeat the mistake of migrating to streaming.", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI"}, {"id": 798509186, "item_id": 49906824, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906824", "by": "raffraffraff", "date": "2026-09-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience", "excerpt": "I used to love Last.FM and was a paid subscriber. Their neighbourhood radio was a great way to find music rateyourmusic.com is also dead to me now. And MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience and a primary focus on listing every issue of an album in every country and in every format (who the hell wants that?)", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "RSS Feeds for Last.fm"}]}, {"text": " for identifying and tagging personal music libraries.", "cites": [{"id": 732911684, "item_id": 45806980, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806980", "by": "_-_-__-_-_-", "date": "2025-11-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "a combination of beets and MusicBrainz for tagging", "excerpt": "I have a music folder 45000+ tracks and counting dating from as far back as 2003. I sync this 450 GB folder to two computers using syncthing and then use rsync to synchronize a subset of these albums (folders by format) to SD Cards inside iPod's. I use Strawberry player for listening (a fork of Clementine) and a combination of beets and MusicBrainz for tagging. Then, I scrobble my listens on ListenBrainz. When I'm in", "context": "45000+ track music library since 2003", "use_case": "music tagging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Maintaining a Music Library, Ten Years On"}, {"id": 791672339, "item_id": 49479521, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479521", "by": "toomuchtodo", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "identifying and categorizing those imports using Musicbrainz", "excerpt": "Great work!! Would you be willing to consider supporting ingesting music using yt-dlp and libtorrent, identifying and categorizing those imports using Musicbrainz, and potentially storing them in an S3 compatible target (versus a POSIX filesystem)? Happy to contribute to a tip jar for these feature enhancements and any token costs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49259861 (last line) https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata tagging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Fastpotify \u2013 a fast, native Spotify client in Rust and egui"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is poor user experience, including a tagger you must open and point at files manually,", "cites": [{"id": 798509186, "item_id": 49906824, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906824", "by": "raffraffraff", "date": "2026-09-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience", "excerpt": "I used to love Last.FM and was a paid subscriber. Their neighbourhood radio was a great way to find music rateyourmusic.com is also dead to me now. And MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience and a primary focus on listing every issue of an album in every country and in every format (who the hell wants that?)", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "RSS Feeds for Last.fm"}, {"id": 799471056, "item_id": 49966941, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49966941", "by": "tancop", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did", "excerpt": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did but I don't think using a tagger as a separate program you have to open and point to a file is good UX, even if the tag lookup is fully automated. It should be a daemon that auto tags all new files in the background and only prompts you when there's a problem. And if it finds a new song with metadata that's not in the database you get the option to upload it. Even better if ", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Picard 3.0"}]}, {"text": " and one commenter dislikes its focus on listing every edition of an album.", "cites": [{"id": 798509186, "item_id": 49906824, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906824", "by": "raffraffraff", "date": "2026-09-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience", "excerpt": "I used to love Last.FM and was a paid subscriber. Their neighbourhood radio was a great way to find music rateyourmusic.com is also dead to me now. And MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience and a primary focus on listing every issue of an album in every country and in every format (who the hell wants that?)", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "RSS Feeds for Last.fm"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Valued resource", "summary": "Commenters praise the project and thank it for its work.", "quotes": [{"id": 782894930, "item_id": 48930933, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930933", "by": "BLKNSLVR", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "MusicBrainz[1] is also doing god's work.", "excerpt": "Edited to add first: nice article covering an important couple of critical pieces of the Internet's history. Concerning the \"Joy\" element: Someone at my workplace started a Music League, with a select few music aficionados and hangers on joining, and it has been _the best_ team bonding exercise I've ever been involved with. We have covered a broad spectrum of topics that have challenged pretty much everyone at some p", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "The lost joy of music piracy"}, {"id": 799471056, "item_id": 49966941, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49966941", "by": "tancop", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did", "excerpt": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did but I don't think using a tagger as a separate program you have to open and point to a file is good UX, even if the tag lookup is fully automated. It should be a daemon that auto tags all new files in the background and only prompts you when there's a problem. And if it finds a new song with metadata that's not in the database you get the option to upload it. Even better if ", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Picard 3.0"}, {"id": 767757017, "item_id": 47984813, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47984813", "by": "gverrilla", "date": "2026-05-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Shoutout to MusicBrainz.", "excerpt": "AI helped me escape from my Spotify kidnap. The stack I use now: Docker, Lidarr, slskd, Tubifarry, Prowlarr, qBittorrent, Blissful and Soulmate. And Strawberry for playlists/playback. Shoutout to MusicBrainz. Very happy to be rebuilding my music library. And this time no song will ever become unavailable out of the blue again. I'm never going to repeat the mistake of migrating to streaming.", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI"}]}, {"label": "Tagging and identification", "summary": "Used to tag and identify tracks in local music collections.", "quotes": [{"id": 732911684, "item_id": 45806980, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806980", "by": "_-_-__-_-_-", "date": "2025-11-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "a combination of beets and MusicBrainz for tagging", "excerpt": "I have a music folder 45000+ tracks and counting dating from as far back as 2003. I sync this 450 GB folder to two computers using syncthing and then use rsync to synchronize a subset of these albums (folders by format) to SD Cards inside iPod's. I use Strawberry player for listening (a fork of Clementine) and a combination of beets and MusicBrainz for tagging. Then, I scrobble my listens on ListenBrainz. When I'm in", "context": "45000+ track music library since 2003", "use_case": "music tagging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Maintaining a Music Library, Ten Years On"}, {"id": 791672339, "item_id": 49479521, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479521", "by": "toomuchtodo", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "identifying and categorizing those imports using Musicbrainz", "excerpt": "Great work!! Would you be willing to consider supporting ingesting music using yt-dlp and libtorrent, identifying and categorizing those imports using Musicbrainz, and potentially storing them in an S3 compatible target (versus a POSIX filesystem)? Happy to contribute to a tip jar for these feature enhancements and any token costs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49259861 (last line) https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata tagging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Fastpotify \u2013 a fast, native Spotify client in Rust and egui"}, {"id": 799471056, "item_id": 49966941, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49966941", "by": "tancop", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did", "excerpt": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did but I don't think using a tagger as a separate program you have to open and point to a file is good UX, even if the tag lookup is fully automated. It should be a daemon that auto tags all new files in the background and only prompts you when there's a problem. And if it finds a new song with metadata that's not in the database you get the option to upload it. Even better if ", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Picard 3.0"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "User experience", "summary": "The UX is called horrible, and a separately launched tagger is called poor UX.", "quotes": [{"id": 798509186, "item_id": 49906824, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906824", "by": "raffraffraff", "date": "2026-09-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience", "excerpt": "I used to love Last.FM and was a paid subscriber. Their neighbourhood radio was a great way to find music rateyourmusic.com is also dead to me now. And MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience and a primary focus on listing every issue of an album in every country and in every format (who the hell wants that?)", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "RSS Feeds for Last.fm"}, {"id": 799471056, "item_id": 49966941, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49966941", "by": "tancop", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did", "excerpt": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did but I don't think using a tagger as a separate program you have to open and point to a file is good UX, even if the tag lookup is fully automated. It should be a daemon that auto tags all new files in the background and only prompts you when there's a problem. And if it finds a new song with metadata that's not in the database you get the option to upload it. Even better if ", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Picard 3.0"}]}, {"label": "Edition overload", "summary": "One commenter dislikes its focus on listing every country and format of an album.", "quotes": [{"id": 798509186, "item_id": 49906824, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906824", "by": "raffraffraff", "date": "2026-09-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience", "excerpt": "I used to love Last.FM and was a paid subscriber. Their neighbourhood radio was a great way to find music rateyourmusic.com is also dead to me now. And MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience and a primary focus on listing every issue of an album in every country and in every format (who the hell wants that?)", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "RSS Feeds for Last.fm"}]}], "who": [{"by": "_-_-__-_-_-", "context": "45000+ track music library since 2003", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806980", "date": "2025-11-03"}], "tags": ["for self-hosted music libraries", "for beets users"], "use_cases": ["music metadata", "music metadata tagging", "music tagging"], "compared": [{"slug": "strawberry", "name": "Strawberry", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "spotify", "name": "Spotify", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49965047", "title": "Picard 3.0", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49903862", "title": "RSS Feeds for Last.fm", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479389", "title": "Show HN: Fastpotify \u2013 a fast, native Spotify client in Rust and egui", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930454", "title": "The lost joy of music piracy", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976856", "title": "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45753109", "title": "Maintaining a Music Library, Ten Years On", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 799471056, "item_id": 49966941, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49966941", "by": "tancop", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did", "excerpt": "I love MusicBrainz for everything they did but I don't think using a tagger as a separate program you have to open and point to a file is good UX, even if the tag lookup is fully automated. It should be a daemon that auto tags all new files in the background and only prompts you when there's a problem. And if it finds a new song with metadata that's not in the database you get the option to upload it. Even better if ", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Picard 3.0"}, {"id": 798509186, "item_id": 49906824, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906824", "by": "raffraffraff", "date": "2026-09-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience", "excerpt": "I used to love Last.FM and was a paid subscriber. Their neighbourhood radio was a great way to find music rateyourmusic.com is also dead to me now. And MusicBrainz is an excellent resource marred by horrible user experience and a primary focus on listing every issue of an album in every country and in every format (who the hell wants that?)", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "RSS Feeds for Last.fm"}, {"id": 791672339, "item_id": 49479521, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479521", "by": "toomuchtodo", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "identifying and categorizing those imports using Musicbrainz", "excerpt": "Great work!! Would you be willing to consider supporting ingesting music using yt-dlp and libtorrent, identifying and categorizing those imports using Musicbrainz, and potentially storing them in an S3 compatible target (versus a POSIX filesystem)? Happy to contribute to a tip jar for these feature enhancements and any token costs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49259861 (last line) https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata tagging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Fastpotify \u2013 a fast, native Spotify client in Rust and egui"}, {"id": 782894930, "item_id": 48930933, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930933", "by": "BLKNSLVR", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "MusicBrainz[1] is also doing god's work.", "excerpt": "Edited to add first: nice article covering an important couple of critical pieces of the Internet's history. Concerning the \"Joy\" element: Someone at my workplace started a Music League, with a select few music aficionados and hangers on joining, and it has been _the best_ team bonding exercise I've ever been involved with. We have covered a broad spectrum of topics that have challenged pretty much everyone at some p", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "The lost joy of music piracy"}, {"id": 767757017, "item_id": 47984813, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47984813", "by": "gverrilla", "date": "2026-05-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Shoutout to MusicBrainz.", "excerpt": "AI helped me escape from my Spotify kidnap. The stack I use now: Docker, Lidarr, slskd, Tubifarry, Prowlarr, qBittorrent, Blissful and Soulmate. And Strawberry for playlists/playback. Shoutout to MusicBrainz. Very happy to be rebuilding my music library. And this time no song will ever become unavailable out of the blue again. I'm never going to repeat the mistake of migrating to streaming.", "context": "", "use_case": "music metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI"}, {"id": 732911684, "item_id": 45806980, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806980", "by": "_-_-__-_-_-", "date": "2025-11-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "a combination of beets and MusicBrainz for tagging", "excerpt": "I have a music folder 45000+ tracks and counting dating from as far back as 2003. I sync this 450 GB folder to two computers using syncthing and then use rsync to synchronize a subset of these albums (folders by format) to SD Cards inside iPod's. I use Strawberry player for listening (a fork of Clementine) and a combination of beets and MusicBrainz for tagging. Then, I scrobble my listens on ListenBrainz. When I'm in", "context": "45000+ track music library since 2003", "use_case": "music tagging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Maintaining a Music Library, Ten Years On"}]}