The real data for, say, an artist would be the actual, physical artist. What we have is data about the artist, we don’t actually have a digital copy of any living (or dead) artists in our system(!), but we do have data about these artists. That is, we have metadata about the artists.
The real data for some audio/music would be the actual audio/music—we don’t store music in our system, so we can’t have the actual audio (this would be a copyright/licensing hell), but we can store data about the audio/music. This would be metadata about the audio/music.
I understand we are using different words to describe data
If you are saying that you have the artist names, record labels, track names, etc in the database then this is exactly what im looking for.
I thought for a moment that the database only contained references to the data im looking for that is stored elsewhere and if that was the case then this wouldn’t work for me. But fortunately this is what I need it seems.
Yes, the term metadata comes from library cataloguing. Metadata is the data about a book, not the information in the book: author, date, publisher, length, subject matter, etc. Extended to music, then…
