Me & MusicBrainz

Since October 2002 I've been working a lot on MusicBrainz (formerly known as CDIndex), an electronic music encyclopedia.  The benefits of MusicBrainz over other music databases (e.g. FreeDB or CDDB) include:

• All the data is made freely available under a mixture of a Public Domain and Creative Commons Share-Alike Licence, which means that we're not going to (and can't) charge a fee for access to the data. 

• We aim to provide high quality metadata, where the data is both accurate and well-presented (for example, we hunt down and fix data which has been incorrectly entered all in capitals).

• Anyone can add or edit data in the database.  If you see something that's wrong or missing, you can just log in and fix it!

I've pretty much taken on all the server programming, which is a mixture of Postgres and Apache with mod_perl.  See these pages for more information about the project, or search or browse the database for your favourite artists.

Update: as of mid 2005-ish, I no longer regularly hack on the MusicBrainz server, but I'm still involved in other ways.