AmpliFIND

» see amplifindmusicservices.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Everybody who collected mp3 files in the early 2000s ended up with the same problem. I did most of mine in internet cafes in Turkey between 2002 and 2005, and what came home on a CD-R was a folder of files called track01.mp3, or named after whoever had ripped them, with any Turkish characters in the artist name already mangled into something else by the time they reached me. The audio was fine. Everything around the audio was garbage.

The fix was a fingerprint. Instead of trusting the filename or the ID3 tag, a program read the actual waveform, computed a compact signature from it, and asked a server what that signature belonged to. MusicDNS was the service that answered. You pointed MusicBrainz Picard at a folder of nameless files and it came back with the artist and the track filled in, because the sound had turned out to be the most reliable identifier in the file.

The architecture was open in one half and closed in the other. libOFA, the library that produced the fingerprint, shipped under the GPL and the Adaptive Public License, so anyone could generate one. The database that turned a fingerprint into an answer was proprietary and ran on somebody else's server. The second half is the part that could be sold, and in 2011 it was.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a PUID was ~

The identifier handed back was a PUID, a Portable Unique Identifier, and the thing worth understanding is that it carried no acoustic information whatsoever. It was a short alphanumeric key built on the UUID standard. Your program submitted a fingerprint, the server looked for an approximate match, and when it found one it returned the key, which your program then used to look up the real metadata somewhere else.

MusicBrainz started issuing PUIDs in March 2006 and Picard shipped support in version 0.7.0 that July. By October the same year MusicIP was reporting more than 22 million fingerprints in the database, which for a music identification system built by one small company was a serious number.

~ the sale that ended it ~

MusicIP dissolved in 2008. Its chief executive, Andrew Stess, bought the rights to MusicDNS, renamed the software AmpliFIND and started AmpliFIND Music Services to carry it on. In June 2011 he sold that company to Sony Corporation of America, who already owned Gracenote and put it there. Tribune Media later bought Gracenote, MusicDNS included, in February 2014.

None of those owners had a reason to keep a free lookup service answering queries for an open metadata project. The Echo Nest released Echoprint as open source in June 2011, the same month as the Sony sale, and MetaBrainz wrote then that the open source fingerprint era had begun. Chromaprint, started in February 2010 by the long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský, became the basis of AcoustID and took the job.

~ 15 october 2013 ~

Support for PUIDs was removed from the MusicBrainz server on 15 October 2013. That is the death. MusicBrainz was the last large consumer, the PUID had almost no life outside it, and MusicDNS was declared end of life with the policy from then on being that only fully open fingerprinting would be supported.

The data lingered another seven years. All PUID edits were removed from the MusicBrainz database on 15 June 2020, which is when those twenty-two million fingerprints stopped existing for anyone outside Gracenote. amplifindmusicservices.com went on serving a page until late 2021 before it started redirecting away, and amplifind.com today belongs to a background screening firm with no connection to any of this.

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