How might MusicBrainz integration help you in a MacOS Music companion app?

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Hi all — I’m an independent Mac developer working on a new project called gr∞ves, a macOS companion app to Apple Music.

The idea is to bring back a bit of the album-oriented listening experience for people who maintain their own digital music libraries. While a track or album is playing, the app displays the cover art at large scale on the desktop and can surface additional artwork (alternate covers, booklet images, etc.), along with expanded information about the release, and more details from user tags than Apple Music exposes.

Right now the metadata enrichment side leans mostly on Discogs and the user’s existing tags, since the focus has been on edition-specific artwork and release details.

However, while building this I’ve been thinking that MusicBrainz could potentially add some interesting dimensions, especially for things like:

  • canonical artist identities and aliases
  • relationships between artists and works
  • cross-links to other databases
  • more consistent identifiers for releases across libraries

Before I go too far down that path I was curious about a couple things from the community here:

  • Do people commonly embed MusicBrainz IDs in their personal library tags (MBID, release group ID, etc.)?

  • If a tool detected those IDs in tags, would resolving additional metadata through the MusicBrainz API be useful in practice? Why for you?

  • Are there particular parts of the MusicBrainz data model that third-party listening tools tend to underutilize?

  • adding last.fm scrobble support is on the long-term road map. would users here like to see it also support ListenBrainz?

If anyone is curious about the project itself, there’s a brief overview here:

And there’s currently a small public TestFlight beta open for Mac users:

I’d especially be interested to hear from anyone here who maintains large tagged libraries or already incorporates MusicBrainz identifiers into their files — it would help guide whether MB integration would actually improve the experience.

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Hello! I have a reasonably large music collection, and my daily drive machine is a Mac.

I buy my music from the Artist when I can, on CD if possible, and digitally otherwise. Yes, I put the correct MBID in every single track that I ingest. The slowest, most tedious part of my ingestion process, in fact, is entering Artist entries to MusicBrainz so that I can use them when I enter Release entries to MusicBrainz, so that MusicBrainz has an MBID for me to put in my music files.

On the other hand, my music is mostly classical (Western European art music) and opera. The metadata I value is different from the metadata a pop music fan might value. I want to be able to search by work, by composer, and by performer.

Also, I value having a database of metadata locally, so that I don’t have to wait for searches to the MusicBrainz database to complete as I look through my music collection.

I have never used last.fm or ListenBrainz, I barely know how to spell “scrobble”, let alone know what it means, and so features like that have little value to me.

I hope this data point is helpful for you. Good luck with the project!