Toot your own horn

Real announces Helix Community grants

Real Networks has just announced the Helix Community Grant awards. I'm pleased to tell you that I was one of the recipients of this grant. My grant work will encompass:

A Helix Community grant was awarded to Robert Kaye to integrate the MusicBrainz metadata tagging capabilities into the Helix client. Unlike the MusicBrainz Tagger this tagging application will be geared to clean up the music metadata as a user listens to the music files in their collection.

As a user listens to their audio collection the TRM enabled player will automatically generate a TRM acoustic fingerprint for the audio file and look up the correct metadata on the MusicBrainz server. If the file is recognized by MusicBrainz, the new metadata will be automatically written back to the audio file. If not, the user will need to use the application to match the audio file to an existing track in MusicBrainz.

After the user has matched their local tracks against the MusicBrainz database, the TRM ids are submitted to MusicBrainz, so that others may benefit from the work that users before them have done. This commons approach to music metadata allows MusicBrainz to coordinate thousands of volunteers to build a comprehensive music metadatabase. In time MusicBrainz would extend the data it captures and branch out to subjective metadata like artist/album review.

You can keep track of this project at the MusicBrainz Helix home page. I really should stop blogging and continue writing code, but...

Posted by Mayhem at January 22, 2004 11:08 AM