tag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:/discussions/problems/46735-musicbrainzbeaTunes: Discussion 2017-09-12T07:32:41Ztag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/434188432017-09-12T07:32:41Z2017-09-12T07:32:41ZMusicBrainz<div><p>Hey Christian,</p>
<p><a href="https://musicbrainz.org">MusicBrainz</a> is a website that aims at providing correct metadata for <em>all</em> music. It's created and edited by volunteers. While millions of songs are in there and therefore have ids, plenty of songs don't. In essence, a MusicBrainz id is the last part of a URL like <a href="https://musicbrainz.org/recording/e57c0b01-110e-4ea1-9dca-6e3c9ac33ca4">https://musicbrainz.org/recording/e57c0b01-110e-4ea1-9dca-6e3c9ac33ca4</a>, in this case pointing to the recording "Sekt zum Frühstück". Its id is <code>e57c0b01-110e-4ea1-9dca-6e3c9ac33ca4</code>.</p>
<p>MusicBrainz serves many other services as a reference. Therefore, MusicBrainz ids are often used to identify a given title. E.g. <a href="http://www.last.fm">Last.FM</a> uses MusicBrainz ids in their API, as well as <a href="https://acousticbrainz.org">AcousticBrainz</a>.</p>
<p>In order to look up data from third party services like AcousticBrainz, beaTunes needs to first figure out the MusicBrainz id for a given song. Then, using that id as a handle, it can look up data from such other services. beaTunes uses its own database to look up the MusicBrainz id. When you're seeing the message, that beaTunes was unable to find a MusicBrainz id, it simply means that either the song does not have a MusicBrainz id yet or that beaTunes could not find it in its own database.</p>
<p>If you're interested in finding out what the cause of the problem is, you can go to <a href="https://musicbrainz.org">MusicBrainz</a> and look up your song manually. If you cannot find it, it's simply not in the database yet. You might want to <a href="https://musicbrainz.org/doc/How_to_Contribute">add it</a>.</p>
<p>If it's on MusicBrainz, but beaTunes still cannot find it, either it's not in the beaTunes database or it cannot be found (due to a different spelling or the like). In that case, you might want to use the <a href="https://picard.musicbrainz.org">Picard tagger</a> to add ids to your files.</p>
<p>Hope this explains things!</p>
<p>-hendrik</p></div>hendrik