Music and the Web of Linked Data - ISMIR 2009 Tutorial

GNATLib is a Python library for looking up Musicbrainz IDs and URIs from music metadata. Metadata can be read from the ID3 tags of audio files or entered manually.

Requirements

• musicbrainz2 - http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PythonMusicBrainz2
• mutagen - easy_install mutagen

Installation

Currently GNATLib is in pre-release beta and can only be checked out from the subversion repository.

svn co https://motools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/motools/gnatlib/src gnatlib_src
cd gantlib_src
python setup.py install

Usage

There are two basic functions available in GNATLib - filelookup() and metadatalookup. Both are demonstrated in the following listing:

>> import gnatlib
>> result = gnatlib.filelookup('test.mp3')
20.04.09 17:11:34 DEBUG     - Trying to guess an ID for track "Light My Fire", artist "Jay Dee", release "Donuts", track number 4
20.04.09 17:11:34 DEBUG    ID Found !
>> result['artistURI']
u'http://musicbrainz.org/artist/cbcbb22c-3a8d-46af-b4ba-09c98f0d7931'

>> gnatlib.metadatalookup(artist='Jay Dee', release='Donuts')
20.04.09 17:21:07 DEBUG     - Trying to guess an ID for track "None", artist "Jay Dee", release "Donuts", track number None
20.04.09 17:21:07 DEBUG    ID Found !

{'artist': ,
 'artistMbz': u'http://musicbrainz.org/artist/cbcbb22c-3a8d-46af-b4ba-09c98f0d7931',
 'artistURI': u'http://dbtune.org/musicbrainz/resource/artist/cbcbb22c-3a8d-46af-b4ba-09c98f0d7931',
 'releaceMbz': u'http://musicbrainz.org/release/e3655e9f-3db1-434d-bb4b-3529d09b2989',
 'release': ,
 'releaseURI': u'http://dbtune.org/musicbrainz/resource/release/e3655e9f-3db1-434d-bb4b-3529d09b2989',
 'score': 88,
 'track': None}

Notice this actually returns the more accurate result for 'J-Dilla' the pseudonym
used by Jay Dee when the album 'Donuts' was released.

Known Issues

2009-08-27

• @param use_cache=False does not seem to work correctly - sorry you've got to use the cache for now...
• turning off verbose seems to not work
• no clean up of the ./cache directory - you have to do this yourself
• we use dbtune.org/musicbrainz URIs - it is not clear this is best
• no support for PUID MusicDNS lookup