MusicBrainz .vs. Million Song Dataset (battle of the Open Music databases)
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I’m looking to add a significant amount of Music data to the OpenRecommender project to power the new Music Recommendation services.
Since I couldn’t find one, I feel compelled to write a side-by-side comparison between MusicBrainz (the old trusty) and the Million Song Database by LabROSA @ Columbia U. (the new kid in town). The following is the breakdown, and though I’ll offer my thoughts at the end, I’ll encourage the reader decide which is the best data source.
Ready? BATTLE!
| MusicBrainz | Million Song Dataset |
|---|---|
 MusicBrainz Data Dump License: Features:
|
 By LabROSA Data Dump License: Features:
|
In the end I think that MusicBrainz is a “no-brainer” in terms of being the quickest most effective way of quickly populating data for a Recommender; however, even from only scratching the surface of what’s available in the Million Song Dataset, its pretty clear that its a requirement for any Recommendation Engine that claims to be complete in the area of music recommendations, thus any final product should undertake the extra steps, effort and computing capacity required for running it.
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